About

My Maxims

Swing a design hatchet.

Chop the complexity in half. Playtest. Then swing again. Game designers forget their amazing ideas were once new to them. New players get overwhelmed. Keep reducing until you find the core loop, then build back carefully. Removing features is often more powerful than adding them.

Resist the urge to make it beautiful.

Polishing feels satisfying, but it's a trap. Keep your prototypes loose. Avoid full-color and photorealism. Black and white sketches signal an idea can still change, and it invites input from everyone, not just visual thinkers.

Feedback dries up when collaborators see something that looks final. They assume it's finished, or that changing it would take too much time and effort (including AI tokens!) My storyboards have rallied teams, won executive buy-in, and earned full-time job offers.

Only change one variable before you playtest anew.

Modify two or more things at once and you'll never know which game levers connect to the feel of your game. Prototyping uses the scientific method. Only modify ONE dynamic at a time. Discipline here saves you time because you learn WHAT and HOW each game feature impacts the overall player experience.

Speak publicly each year about something you love.

As expertise grows, the ability to share it clearly has to grow with it. Speaking keeps you humble and connected to people with the same questions you once had. I've spoken at The White House, TEDxGrandRapids, GDC, Games for Health, and Carnegie Mellon — find your topic, find your audience, show up. It doesn't take much prep. What's normal to you is valuable to someone else.

XR Terra, 12 Week Bootcamp in AR & VR for Developers, 2020

Learned Unity, some C-Sharp coding, GitHub, XCode and XR (Extended Reality) for Oculus, Android, and iOS with staff and classmates that I’ve never met in person. Presented both of our successful team projects to Boston VR at the completion of the course: a VR Crane Training app for Packet 39 and an AR Covid Ward spatial computing app for PTC. Also awarded scholarship to Oculus Launchpad and Facebook Connect 2020.

Carnegie Mellon University, BFA, Industrial Design

This is where I forged a solid foundation for my collaborative, user-focused design career, refined my sketching and thinking skills, and discovered a love of game design. It was the extra activities beyond requirement that made all the difference: Art Directing our award winning student newspaper, The Tartan, co-leading the design of The World of Dr. Seuss Spring Carnival Booth with my MechE roommate, and attending a semester in Essen, Germany during my senior year.