PROJECT OVERVIEW
Producer / Co-Director - Created and maintained large production workbooks, game design documents, meetings documents, asset catelogues, and more alongside Michael Mrizek.
UI Specialist: Art, Design, and Programming - Created, implemented, and animated main UI menus using Unity's UI Toolkit, including creating Editor UI tools to generate new inventory item types and manage complex trees of stats and conditions.
Concept Artist and Art Pipeline Designer - Primarily created character and UI concept art; Additionally developed ethics-first AI brainstorming to concept art pipelines to help speed up the concept side of prodution and increase the sustainability of our project for our team members.
3D Artist (Secondary) - Focus on creation and implementation of various flora and background elements found throughout the prototypes, including trees, signposts, and teddybears.
Thesis Co-Author - Co-Authored the 328 page Master's Thesis, Navigating Burns and Burnout in an Industry Imitation, with Michael Mrizek. This covered a wide variety of topics, including the ethical usage of AI in the production process, fostering sustainable practices in a dynamic work environment with a small team, creating space for experimentation, navigating proper representation in climate crisis topics, and much more. This thesis paper includes numerous examples of our production and documentation processes in the Appendix, starting on page 78.
Programmer - Focus on UI, Backend systems (Saving and Loading), and Editor tools, with work done on various other topics; Additionally, maintained coding documentation policies, training, and enforcement throughout our code base.
Game Designer - General throughout the project.
This project was created for the capstone project of the MFA in Games and Interactivity program at American University, and spanned 3 full semesters.
GAME SUMMARY
Tech Stack
Dev Platform: Unity 2022.3
Code Editor: Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Version Control: GitHub, GitHub Copilot Max, Git LFS
Artistic Software: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Blender 3D, Substance 3D Suite
Planning Workspaces: Google Drive Suite; Microsoft Office 365 - Word, PowerPoint, Excel; Atlaissan - Jira, Confluence
Development Time Frame - 1.5 years with university; estimated 2+ years for full production of concept.
Team Size - 5
"What would you do in a wildfire?"
Bringing together the tension from the
Last of Us
and the serenity from
A Short Hike
;
Scorched Earth
is an
adventure survival craft
game in a world set ablaze, where you must find a new way to persevere with a community of fellow survivors. You’ll venture into Burns, forests and lost structures full of danger, to find vital resources for your growing village.
This project was the founding project for Gaming Gourd Studio and remains on indefinite hold while we work on our current project, Improv Fight Night.
To see more about the full concept, see
our most recent pitch deck
, or
read our Master's Thesis
.