On the Line is a game made over the course of 3 months by Red Bear Games as part of Octopus 8 Studios. The game is a multiplayer cross between Papers, Please and Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes where one player takes on the role of an emergency services operator and the other player uses a PDF of emergency service information to help the operator give the correct advice for each unique situation.

On this project, I worked as a Producer. Managing the rest of the team, keeping organisational software up to date, leading daily stand-ups, and interacting with Octopus 8 management and stakeholders.

I also did some design work, creating initial design documents and refining gameplay mechanics. When needed I also wrote dialogue and advised on artistic decisions.

Intraliminal is a narrative exploration game and my attempt at re-creating liminal spaces from my childhood and using them to analyse elements of my life growing up and how different it could have gone.

It was made using the limited tools of Bitsy3D. While working on this I got to develop my artistic and level design skills as so much of the game relied heavily on the visual feel of each area.

Overall, the creation process relied on a lot of tweaking and refining of every environment, animation and bit of dialogue. The limitations of the engine led to a very refined and polished experience.

The Witch of Wish Mountain is a single-player branching narrative game made in Unity using the Fungus plug-in.

It takes inspiration from text adventures, 2-stat games, and fairytales. Particularly it emulates traditional ideas about the fae and fairies in an Alice in Wonderland-style otherworld.

My main design focus was on the core mechanic of balancing the player’s two stats: magic and mundane. Throughout the game, both stats are tested and changed. However, in fairytale style, the outcome of the player’s decision is not always clear. I solved this by splitting the decision into two: the easy and known path or the difficult and unknown path. Just like the structure of fairytales.

Red String is a narrative escape room where players work together to unravel a murder mystery. The game was designed for exhibition spaces but can also be printed and played at home.

The game is made up of various documents written by me that detail the unsolved police investigation into an occult murder in northern England.

These documents are written to each add a small part to the overall story that can only be understood by players working together by building a conspiracy board of game documents and their own notes and ideas.

Designing this allowed me to explore asymmetric multiplayer alongside a fractured narrative. Expanding my writing skills and ensuring every document had something unique to add to gameplay.

Black Witch’s Grimoire is a single-player journaling TTRPG exploring trauma, recovery, and cycles of violence through a coven of black witches all trying to escape something.

This game is played over 7 days with each day giving a new prompt to write and a new magical event to complete. As you play you create an artefact of your character’s journey as the grimoire your write gets warped, changed, and potentially destroyed along with you and your coven.

This game relies on a careful balance between narrative and mechanics. The prompts and events needed to be open enough to encourage creativity while constraining enough to direct the story to the necessary plot points and not leave the player overwhelmed with options.

This balance was achieved through careful word choice in the prompts and a strong thematic grounding. This seems to have been successful as, currently, the game has over 100 downloads.