Don't Run With Scissors is an infinite runner game that uses an alternative controller: a giant pair of scissors! The project was an Independent Games Festival (IGF) Alt.Ctrl Award Finalist and was exhibited at GDC Festival of Gaming 2026. We are currently negotiating an offer from a major game company to take it to market as an arcade game. I am developing the game with eight other students, three developers and five designers. The game is being developed using Unity for software development and Arduino for hardware (the controller). I used out of the box thinking to help construct an oversized controller that makes a more traditional game format feel unique. I led the development of two key gameplay features – the scoring system and the countdown timer– from the ideation phase through technical implementation and playtesting. Both features went through multiple iterations. We held bimonthly playtesting events to hear from our players and improve the game based on their feedback.

Telling the Bees is a narrative-forward rhythm game I helped develop for IndieCade’s Climate Jam. In six weeks, my team and I developed, designed, coded, and iterated on prototypes, using agile methodology, to move from an early concept to a full release of the game. My role on the project was the primary Unity programmer. In the first weeks of the jam, I developed the first few iterations of our rhythm encounter, and once we had reached a workable prototype, I pivoted to UI/UX implementation, working with our UI Artist and our Narrative Designer/Project Lead. IndieCade’s judging panel awarded our team third place, out of approximately 50 games, for the Best Use of Theme award.

This game is inspired by the lives of people who lived through the AIDS Crisis, and designed to evoke empathy, understanding, and a strong sense of community. Aimed at young adults and students, but meaningful for any open-minded player, it serves as both a collaborative puzzle game and an educational tool. By stepping into the experiences of individuals affected by the epidemic, players learn through shared discussion, teamwork, and perspective-taking rather than passive facts. By placing players inside lived experiences, Piecing Together fosters understanding, compassion, and community; cornerstones of meaningful social change. Piecing Together is an accessible educational tool that not only spreads accurate knowledge about HIV/AIDS, but actively combats stigma and isolation at their roots. The game is designed to transform awareness into empathy through embodied learning, an approach proven to break down stereotypes and challenge misinformation in ways traditional education often cannot.

Queer: It's Not A Bad Word is a game about queer identity, queer history, and queer community. The game is an educational text-based RPG based on interviews with real people. In the game, you can explore New York City, Rochester, and Washington, D.C. and talk to people you encounter along the way. In your travels you will hear the stories of eight different people of different ages, identities, and backgrounds. This project aims to increase awareness of the queer community-- our culture, our experiences, and our many varied members-- for those in the community and for our allies. Representation is important and what is better representation than the stories of real people? I began working on this project in my freshman year at RIT as an independent project, working as lead developer. I have done all of the interviewing, writing, and coding work myself, with help from friends and classmates to create the art. The game is a work in progress and was originally developed using Twine and ink, text-based game engines for branching narratives. I have begun porting the game into Unity using a plugin library that supports integration with ink. I plan to eventually release the game on itch.io.

The VIP Program engages both undergraduate and graduate students in faculty-led multidisciplinary project teams. echoes is a credit-bearing student-led, student-run project at Rochester Institute of Technology exploring how developing and playing games can cultivate shared understanding and foster meaningful connections. As part of the web development team, I collaborated with other students using agile production methods to develop and maintain the echoes website, which promotes and hosts student-created games. I completed tasks which were organized and assigned via GitHub Taskboard. I contributed code to the site's pages using Svelte, Tailwind, and NodeJS.

The goal of this project was to create an interactive and informative experience at the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery's Centennial Sculpture Park. The Scultpure Park is a free to access public space where just about anyone can come to see fine art. I worked as part of a team with 3 other students to develop the project. After looking into the park more and visiting it for ourselves, we found that most of the information about the park's sculptures was hidden away on the MAG's website, and unlikely to be found by anyone walking around the park. So, we decided to make that information quickly and easily accessible via AR objects that when clicked or tapped open up a UI that shows information about the sculptures that can typically only be found on the website. The project's code uses location tracking to give users information about nearby sculptures, which can be accessed via red boxes that appear next to the appropriate sculpture. By doing this, we hoped to make the park more interactive and engaging by providing a unique way to learn more about these sculptures.

I made this game for RIT's Interactive Design and Problem Solving course. I built off of a game project I had developed in an earlier course, with more robust graphics and code functionality this time. I was able to implement more features that I had wanted to include originally but due to time constraints and my coding knowledge were outside the scope of the project. The game was made using Javascript and HTML as well as a JS library called PIXI.js which supports browser game development. In the game, the player controls a diver collecting plastic in the ocean. The objective is to collect as much plastic as you can within a minute. You can move the divers with your mouse. Moving the diver over a piece of trash automatically collects the trash and adds to your score based on the type of trash. You get more points for collecting plastic trash.