Casino Royale is a 2D arcade-style platformer beat ’em up built in Unity with Wwise audio integration, developed as part of a three-person team at WPI. Players fight through four levels of casino police and waves of animals using a deck of playing cards and melee weapons tied to the four suits, with a shop system for upgrading cards and buying ammo between stages.

    My role was all of the game’s art, which I took on entirely myself and which marked my first time creating video game animations. I designed and animated every sprite in the game using Piskel, including the main character, cop enemies with suit-specific color variants, a giant boss, rats, cats, weapons, platforms, and five distinct backgrounds spanning casino floors, a shop, and outside environments. I handled all walking and weapon animations, created the shop and stage-progression signs, and built the guide menu, including both the visual design and most of its code implementation. Each sprite went through multiple iterations across six build cycles as the team responded to playtester feedback, shaping everything from enemy color differentiation to how damage states were communicated visually. Working through rounds of critique and tuning, from early hitbox issues to the final polish pass on UI and health balance, gave me hands-on experience translating playtest notes into concrete art and design changes that improved the feel of the game.

    Echoes of the Salt Flats is a tabletop roleplaying game set in Khalyn, a richly built original world developed as my Major Qualifying Project at WPI. The game takes place primarily across the salt flats of Khalyn, with additional biomes including Spire Forests, the Fae Wilds, Fairy Wing Forests, and Fungal Overgrowth, each with their own geography, history, and traditions. One of my core design goals was making the mechanics feel like they grew naturally out of the world itself, including specific mechanics inspired directly by the salt flats setting, so that the rules and the lore reinforce each other rather than feeling separate. Players build characters by choosing from original playable species, defining a backstory, and managing stats alongside a modifier and ability check system. My contributions focused on the worldbuilding side: I designed the major playable species of Khalyn from the ground up, defining what each species is composed of, where they live, their characteristics, and the cultures and traditions that shape how they exist in the world. The team also collectively produced a lore book to support the full project. Building Khalyn taught me how to design worlds where the rules, the setting, and the player experience all feel like they belong to the same place.