I Design, Program, Produce, and Teach Games
-----Expertise in Serious Games-----
This project had no funding to support it. I used my networking skills to obtain rights to use student works from the Robot Split in Time (Team Carl) and Stuffed (Failed 2 Compile Studios) game teams as well as my connection to the MSU Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab to fill out artwork needs. All code in the project, with the exception of some smaller scripts, was written by myself. Charles Owen provided extensive advising on how to handle circuitry simulation code in the game.
The preliminary results from early data collection were presented as a short-paper (poster) at FDG 21: Common
Narrative in Educational Video Games: Common Narrative in Educational Video Games: A Design of Games to Teach Circuits | Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (acm.org)
The final results from the data collection and thorough analysis have been accepted at the highly competitive ACM conference of the Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education Technical Symposium 2024 (SIGCSE 24): Analyzing Differences in Student Engagement Between a Single Narrative Game Intervention and Multiple Narrative Games Intervention in an Undergraduate Computer Organization and Architecture Class (SIGCSE TS 2024 - Papers) - SIGCSE TS 2024
CircuBot - Dissertation Research
CircuBot was a game developed over my first 2 years of graduate study while also taking the typical course load and teaching 2 courses. I was the primary developer of the game with my advisor Charles Owen providing advice and content expert perspective for the learning content and application context of the games, as he had developed the content for and taught the course they were used in in prior years.
One complete narrative version of the game utilizes a narrative based around the Robot protagonist and a Rat antagonist to tie together the entire game and its learning content. Three separate narrative versions of the game were created such that each version covers a smaller subset of the game and learning content. The first game was used in a study to compare the impact of utilizing an overarching narrative game over multiple sets of course content compared to using singular differing narrative games to cover the same set of content.
The design theory utilized behind the games and insights on that design theory was presented at Meaningful Play 2022:
An additional game design and development framework that combines existing concepts in frameworks, industry, design research, and game interventions to create a more comprehensive framework with recommendations for practical use and application is currently being edited and is aimed to be submitted to a highly relevant journal,
such as the ACM Games: Research and Practice Journal.
Game Dev Tutorial Projects
Within the first year of my graduate studies, I pushed for higher quality game tutorials with a wider range of assets to be available to our students in our program at MSU.
I worked with my teaching mentor and colleague Brian Winn to figure out what funding was available and what projects we could reasonably create for this task.
Then over the course of a summer I oversaw the production of 4 tutorial projects for our Games and Interactivity course at MSU as both the producer and programming lead.
I organized a team of undergraduate student employees at the MSU Games for Entertainment and Learning lab to create the assets for a 2D "twin stick" Shooter, a 2D Platformer, a 3D First Person Shooter, and a 3D Platformer.
I created the original written scripts, videos, and editing for those videos for the four tutorial projects. These have just recently as of Fall Semester 2023 been updated by a student of mine and Brian Winn, with my occasional feedback/input into direction.
This has contributed to incredible progress in accelerating the quality of the overall games program at MSU, as content that used to be in the higher level classes (400 level) that I took at MSU in undergrad are now part of the 100 level Games and Interactivity course I co-teach with Brian.
As part of this gradual improvement, I was also tasked with producing a tutorial project for MI 445 Game Design and Development 1 that would be a refresher to Unity for students starting our game dev minor at MSU after being gone for an entire summer. This time I would primarily be producing and mentoring a new programming lead in the GEL lab on the project.
MI 445 Project 1 General Overview
Overview Of The Unity Refresher Project
MI 445 Project 1 Programmer Overview