Before coming to Canterbury Christ Church University to become a Lecturer in Games Design, I was working at a small local studo making high quality mobile games. The most well known of these titles was Amateur Surgeon 4, which was published by Adult Swim Games.

On AS4 I handled some production duties while covering several areas of design; systems, levels, and chunks of the narrative too. I even wrote the music. During this time I also worked on a number of other projects, and dozens of pitches and proposals for a variety of well-known publishers and IP-holders.

PERSONAL PROJECTS – HIGHLIGHTS

In 2020 I made a little Frogger-inspired arcade game called StarCross as part of a game jam. We ran Isolation Jam 2020 to give students and staff on our course something to do, and entrants had to design around the theme phrase “keep your distance”. In StarCross,the player must deliver love letters from planet to planet, avoiding debris and traffic and collecting presents en route for bonuses. The catch is that the planets drift slightly further apart with every round. The game also features special instrumental versions of a few Hollow Planet Theory songs.

Shutterbugs is a chaotic 4-player photography game made with art assets by my teaching colleague Alan Meades. This was developed for an arcade machine and shown onsite at CCCU during an exhibition of retro arcade photography.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1095390775746023424

Beatopia was an experiment into trying to make a game about music which wasn’t simply about reactively tapping out a beat. As a game designer-musician hybrid I have always been interested in whether or not the act of actually creating music (as opposed to following a pattern in a rhythm game) is something which can be merged with other types of gameplay. If this is an area which interests you – I’d love to hear from you.

We’re All In This Together is a Twine game where you play a mental health “inspector” in a near-future London. A horror story unfolds through the protagonist’s daily work routine. You can play it at the link, and it takes about 30 minutes to reach the end. This was an interesting experiment in trying to do something structurally interesting narrative-design-wise in Twine without writing large chunks of prose.