Experimental Games Workshop
A presentation at the Experimental Games Workshop (EGW) ↗, held during the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. With co-presenter Adam Pype, I discussed our project C.H.A.I.N.G.E.D. and the collaborative work of the Haunted PlayStation 1 collective. The EGW is a GDC tradition of over 20 years that showcases games at the forefront of gameplay, organization, and creative direction. A full video is available in the GDC Vault, linked above.
Related Projects
Genesis
A light-gun game inspired by vector graphics that reimagines the credit crawl sequence from Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001). I developed this game as my submission for the C.H.A.I.N.G.E.D. collaboration. The project was an opportunity to explore motion-captured camera work, gameplay-to-music synchronization, a blocking system for sequencing events, and vector-based rendering.
C.H.A.I.N.G.E.D.
A large-scale, collaborative follow-up to C.H.A.I.N., this project connects over 40 developers' games into a branching narrative. After each entry, the player chooses between two games, representing forks in the timeline. My primary contribution was designing the technical architecture that enabled this branching to occur within the launcher itself, rather than individual games. This key decision made the project feasible to implement across multiple engines and contributors. You can play the full collection here and read an interview about the project.
C.H.A.I.N. 3
The third entry in the C.H.A.I.N. experimental series, this project is a spatially distributed network of game worlds, each built by its own developer, bringing together over 120 contributors from the Haunted PS1 collective and the wider indie community. A door in one game leads to a door in another, and the player's save state is shared between them. As co-director and lead technical developer, I built the launcher application that coordinates these transitions and ensures uniformity across the network. Because the scale is larger than any single person can engage with, the launcher also managed distributed QA via a real-time analytics dashboard, using player movement data to surface errors and bugs across the network. This was supported by a custom automated build system for syncing developer builds, along with other purpose-built coordination tools for over 100 simultaneous contributors.
C.H.A.I.N.
An early collaboration by the Haunted PS1 collective, C.H.A.I.N. was an experimental game series with a unique structure: each developer received a game, created a direct sequel, and then passed it to the next person in the chain. I participated in this project, contributing my own entry, "Drip." The unpredictable, flowing narrative worked well, and the experiment's popularity directly led to the creation of a more ambitious sequel, C.H.A.I.N.G.E.D., in 2022.