Playable
I ship software people play: video games, apps, and creative infrastructure. I’ve built mixed reality systems for real world exhibitions, cultural heritage, scientific research, and design previsualization. I care about the layers beneath the surface of interactive software—editor tooling, technical art, and performance—and how to design systems that learn from the people who use them.
About
I ship software people play: video games, apps, and creative infrastructure. I’ve built mixed reality systems for real world exhibitions, cultural heritage, scientific research, and design previsualization.
I care about the layers beneath the surface of interactive software—editor tooling, technical art, and performance—and how to design systems that learn from the people who use them.
BACKBONE
An immersive horror, first-person stealth exploration game spanning approximately 30 minutes, rendered with NTSC analogue-style graphics that mimic the rainbow iridescence of 1970s television. My contribution to the C.H.A.I.N. 3 network, BACKBONE continued directly from the start node and dramatically expanded the exposition, connecting to three other nodes in the collaborative graph. The game recreates an early 70s midwestern basement—a childhood memory of one of the lead characters—using modular architectural assets to build an atmospheric period environment. Technical features include an inspection system for environmental storytelling, a phone call system for delivering dialogue sequences, and stealth gameplay driven by enemy AI running on a finite state machine with procedural and physics-based animation. As a critical structural node in the network, BACKBONE bridges multiple narrative threads while establishing key mechanical systems for subsequent developers.
C.H.A.I.N. 3
The third entry in the C.H.A.I.N. experimental series, this project is a mass-collaborative game that brings together over 120 developers from the Haunted PS1 and wider indie communities. As co-director and lead technical developer, I created a comprehensive infrastructure to support decentralized creative production at an unprecedented scale. This included a real-time analytics dashboard for developers to collaboratively map the game network, a PHP-based build system with automated itch.io syncing for rapid testing, and other purpose-built coordination tools. The project establishes a new paradigm for mass collaborative game development, replacing previous Google Sheet-based workflows with a robust system for over 100 simultaneous contributors across a branching narrative.
Nicosia International Airport VE
A museum installation featuring a reconstructed 3D model of Nicosia International Airport's modern terminal based on LiDAR scans and archival documentation, housed in a custom-designed wooden console with touchscreen navigation and immersive projection. I developed the participatory virtual environment to test dissertation methodologies on interface-mediated, co-constructive 'virtual places' for heritage, featuring our WIP "propositional model" for focusing public knowledge towards architectural features, and a period landline phone interface for oral story contribution. I also designed and developed the companion website at velab.cloud/nic/en. Deployed in a public exhibition at the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation, the project captured over 3,200 play sessions and 300 oral story recordings, generating new qualitative data that enriches, expands, and challenges the site's limited documentation. See the development timeline for in-progress screenshots and photos.
Soap Soup: Sodium
An atmospheric exploration game created for the 2024 SOAP SOUP collaboration, a modding project where artists create abstract rooms using a fixed set of elements. My entry is a sensory experience that places the player in a sodium-lit parking lot on a midsummer night. I designed a soundscape of cicadas and a distant storm, and used sophisticated spherical projection mapping for the visuals, focusing on creating a realistic and immersive atmosphere of warm light and deep shadow.
The People's Sky 2
The fifth iteration of the People's Tree project series, developed as the centerpiece for the 2025 Madvent launcher. I was invited by the junior team—who had taken over the launcher technology and coordination—to contribute this game for continuity with the series. My contributions focused on technical refinement: redesigning and optimizing the input system for significantly improved panning and zooming controls, recoloring and reskinning the visual aesthetic, and optimizing data serialization and loading sequences. The project marks my transition from lead developer to technical consultant, supporting the next generation of Haunted PS1 organizers.
Paphos Gate: Nicosia
Multiple VR applications (using Oculus DK2 and HTC Vive) to visualize archaeological findings and a proposed architectural intervention for an urban archaeology project in Nicosia. I prototyped and built the applications as a research assistant, developing systems for locomotion, interaction, and gaze-tracking analytics to understand how stakeholders focused on the virtual site. These tools engaged everyone from the public to the Department of Antiquities. The gaze-tracking data directly informed the design of the final public walkway and was integrated into the permanent VR exhibit at the museum. The project spanned a decade and opened to the public in 2024.
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.
GENESIS 2K24
A head-tracked rhythmic rail-shooter that traces the cyberspace aesthetics of Rez (2001) back to their origins in Chicago's art and technology scenes. In collaboration with Charles Voita and Bill Derrah, I led the development of this remake of my 2023 entry for the C.H.A.I.N.G.E.D. project. The game reimagines the Electronic Visualization Laboratory's (EVL) 3D vector graphics for Star Wars (1977) and incorporates head-tracking from the CAVE system (1992), set to Phuture's genre-defining Acid Tracks (1985). It was exhibited at the BitBash 2024 festival.
Better Qr Codes
A custom Python pipeline that embeds full-color images into QR codes while maintaining scannability with standard phone cameras. The technique works by deconstructing a generated QR code into its cellular data. While preserving the critical landing markers, the pipeline reconstructs the data-carrying portions of the code as an image. It overlays this image with a pattern of fine dots, calibrated to manipulate the average luminance within each cell. This ensures that when a scanner samples the cells, it correctly reads them as light or dark, preserving the original data while making the embedded image visible to the human eye.
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.
Madvent 4: End of the Line
A custom launcher for the 2023 Madvent event, an annual Haunted PS1 collaboration where ~30 creators release games daily throughout December. As lead coordinator and launcher developer for the series, I created a fully dynamic train that journeys through various biomes and navigates twisting terrain to connect the individual games.
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 served as a personal platform to explore new technologies, including motion-captured camera techniques, synchronizing gameplay to music, a blocking system for sequencing events, and vector-based rendering.
The People's Sky
The fourth iteration of the People's Tree project, The People's Sky is an experimental game exploring community building by enabling players to design items, append messages, and place them in a shared digital space. For this iteration, I developed several key features, including data-transfer optimizations, new 'trace' visualizations to show player exploration paths, comprehensive analytic logs for post-experiment analysis, and a web application for content moderation.
Are Surveys Necessary? Designing Virtual Environments for Participatory Research
A prototype Virtual Environment (VE) designed as an immersive online 'guest book' where hundreds of users could asynchronously decorate a shared virtual space and leave messages for one another. I developed this VE for a workshop on the intangible cultural heritage of Córdoba's communal patios, introducing key design strategies for asynchronous interaction ('claims' and 'traces') and a novel workflow using Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate qualitative coding and moderation of text contributions. Published as a book chapter in the 2025 Bloomsbury Academic volume, Clever Design in Critical Times: Conceptualizing the Callidocene, arguing that interactive VEs can serve as powerful tools for participatory research, moving beyond the limitations of traditional surveys in the Digital Humanities. The book is available from Bloomsbury Academic.
Otto Wagner Areal - Peter Kogler
An AR sculpture garden featuring Peter Kogler's unmade digital sculptures at Wiener Gesundheitsverbund, an Otto Wagner-designed 19th century medical campus now reused as a university and culture campus. I served as technical producer, taking the artist's intricate 3D meshes, creating site-specific shaders to simulate reflection and lighting, and working on-site with Kogler to place, scale, and rotate the virtual works. I added features to Wikar for real-time metadata syncing from our Clowder server, enabling the rapid placement of eight complex sculptures in a single day. Part of a promotional event.
WIKAR v14
A major update to Wikar for which I developed several key performance and feature improvements in preparation for new AR projects. These included: a multi-tiered caching system to enable offline mode for sculpture gardens; an iterative solver that uses a scan's confidence rating to progressively refine AR placement accuracy; and an optimized mesh slicer system for exploring 3D cross-sections of complex models.
MESH AIRFLOW Visualization
An AR visualization of airflow patterns for a secondary facade system designed by the Cyprus Institute. I took the researchers' 2D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations (heat and flow maps) and UV mapped them onto a 1:1 scale 3D model of the facade, then built a shader to animate these maps with particles, inspired by how *Portal 2* visualizes fluid dynamics. In the final application, users scan a QR code on the test building and see the internal 'stack effect' in action, with callouts indicating sensor locations.
360 Visualizer
A web tool for creating immersive 360 degree panoramas with text and recorded sound for exhibitions, working in all major browsers and using device compass/gyro (or click and drag) to rotate the panorama intuitively. I developed this for the Cyprus Institute. A demo can be found here.
Unité d'Habitation Wikisurvey
A wiki survey tool implementing methods from two previous wiki survey systems (All Our Ideas and POLIS) with new innovations. I developed this web application as part of the MetaFraming research. See the MetaFraming paper for more details.
Haunted Ps1 Demo Disk: Spectral Mall
A custom launcher for the 2022 Haunted PS1 Demo Disk, a curated collection of games selected from hundreds of community submissions. I led the software development for the launcher, which included all coding, gameplay programming, UI design, and tech-art. I was also responsible for organizing the broader collaborative effort.
Córdoba Court
Córdoba Court is an innovative social game I designed and developed to foster community building. Modeled after the communal patios of Córdoba, Spain, the game invites players to cultivate a shared virtual environment, expressing their individuality by designing personalized totems from millions of possible combinations. The project serves as a social experiment in digital placemaking and community greening practices. A report is also available, which analyzes player content and observed behaviors.
Madvent Calendar 3: Necrosis
The official launcher for the 2022 Madvent event, an annual Haunted PS1 collaboration where ~30 creators release games daily throughout December. In my role as lead coordinator and launcher developer, I was responsible for organizing the event and building the application that unites all the contributed games.
Arcade Cabinet
An arcade cabinet designed for exhibiting contemporary art games. The concept's core innovation is a novel fabrication method I developed for creating a perfect, CRT-style curved lens to place over a modern flat-panel screen. The technique adapts the principles of liquid-mirror telescopes: first, liquid silicone is spun in a dish to form a perfect parabolic mold; then, epoxy is poured into the stationary mold to cast the lens. While this fabrication method is developed and ready, the project is currently shelved, awaiting grant funding to produce a full-scale prototype.
BEEP Energy Sim
An AR energy-use visualization showing expected energy loads for every room in a heritage building over the year, taking into account climatic comfort. I built the visualization to explain green infrastructure investments for the adaptive reuse project. More information on the project can be found here.
Eva Schlegel
Public AR installations for artist Eva Schlegel's studio, featuring complex custom shaders developed by her team. My role was to provide the technical education and platform support to make this possible. I extended the Wikar platform with new capabilities specifically for this project, including support for stencil shaders, UI compositing, and safeguarding access to camera textures and other rendering features that Unity would typically strip from a build.
Other Matter
An AR exhibition with Valerie Messini and her students at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. To support the students' creation of interactive and reactive sculptures, I extended the Wikar platform with several new features. This included more robust QR code scanning (improving reliability for inverted codes), expanded UI customization options, and a set of "interaction primitives" that students could use for proximity-based events or custom user controls. A video of the exhibition can be seen here.
Augmented Dreams: AR Sculpture Park
An AR sculpture park for a public exhibition in Graz, Austria, layering digital works by MFA students onto an existing physical sculpture park. As the selected technical producer, my Wikar platform was chosen for its openness and spatial accuracy. The students created site-specific works, some of which extended existing physical sculptures in interesting ways. To meet the high demand for documentation from both students and visitors, I improved Wikar's performance and added new photo and video recording capabilities to the app.
"Scan To Ar": Palermo
A co-design workshop using rapid 3D site capture and an AR design tool with a library of design primitives (akin to Lego bricks). The goal was to repurpose abandoned industrial heritage in Palermo. I collaborated with Federico La Russa to facilitate the workshop, using Wikar (my augmented reality platform) to swiftly mock up and review architectural proposals with stakeholders over a single weekend. The public space opened in October 2022. Conference presentation and publication documented the methodology.
The Peoples Tree 2
The second iteration of the People's Tree project, an experimental game exploring community building in networked spaces. I created this application to allow participants to design ornaments and leave messages on a communal tree, offering a unique blend of interaction and shared digital space. The project served as a valuable opportunity to develop new technology, establish policy frameworks for user-generated content, and conduct comprehensive analytics on player behavior.
Haunted Ps1 Demo Disk 2021
A custom launcher for the 2021 Haunted PS1 Demo Disk, a curated collection of games selected from hundreds of community submissions. As the project lead, I was responsible for organizing the collaborative effort and for the launcher's software development, including all code, gameplay programming, UI, and tech-art.
Where's Home?
An experimental prototype that successfully translated the unshaded, minimalist aesthetic of Rococo into a more complex, architecturally descriptive style. The concept was a sequel to the People's Tree project set in an abstracted Union Station, Chicago. For the prototype, I developed a custom Rhinoceros plugin to optimize and export modular architectural elements, and created a system to randomly place around 100 unique characters and their luggage throughout the scene. While the core technical art was a success, the project was paused to allow for more design iteration on its complex dialogue system.
2 Madvent 2 Calendar
An ornate launcher for the 2021 Madvent event, an annual Haunted PS1 collaboration where ~30 developers release small games daily throughout December. For this event, I both coordinated the project and single-handedly built the launcher application to house the collection of games.
Puzzle Generation
A dungeon generator where monsters trawl on fixed and cyclical paths, creating a looping temporal structure where an agent attempts to reach the end in the shortest amount of forward steps. I developed this using Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm to solve for a sequence of moves in time rather than a shortest traversal path in space, as a final project for a course in algorithmic design.
Erwin Wurm
An AR deployment of Erwin Wurm's sculptural works in new contexts using augmented reality. I worked with Studio Calas in an educational and technical capacity, training their team on how to prepare and optimize 3D models for the Wikar platform and its upload pipeline while they handled photogrammetry and content creation. At their request, I also made Wikar's QR code scanning more robust for outdoor environments and for use with different colored tags.
CryoLumens
An AR artwork representing the strength and location of Earth's magnetic fields using NASA's real-time sensor network, overlaying data-driven particle systems on an original painting using image tracking. I developed the coding and visuals for Eli Joteva, including data-reactive shaders, VFX-graph particles, real-time web monitoring, and full AR integration.
ICT For Urban Heritage: Palermo
A co-design workshop in Palermo to envision the future of an abandoned warehouse, serving as the first field test for my dissertation research on propositional modeling. I designed two competing architectural proposals (conservative and radical) and used my AR platform, Wikar, to allow local stakeholders to view them on-site. By testing the proposals at different scales (a 1:500 map vs. 1:1 walkthroughs), the process surfaced the community's deep attachment to the site's recent, unwritten history as a local park. This visualization work made their tacit knowledge empirically grounded, and the feedback directly informed the final design, which preserved the area as a public plaza.
Rococo
Rococo is my first complete game, built solo in two weeks for the Haunted PS1 Summer of Screams jam. The player bounces on a jelly-like linoleum floor through a child's dream of a deconstructed kitchen, reaching for a floating jar of cookies. Two inputs, three minutes — I focused on making one interaction feel inevitable through custom shaders for an unlit, candy-colored look and a physics-driven sound system that ties audio to the player's motion. An epilogue was added days after release in response to players wanting to stay in the world. Rococo reached 4.6★ across 218 ratings with 109 comments over five years of organic discovery — more individual ratings than any Haunted PS1 collective release except the two flagship Demo Discs.
Drip
A dreamlike ball platformer created in one week for the C.H.A.I.N. collaboration. My task was to create a sequel to a first-person hospital game. To meet the deadline, I used Grasshopper for procedural level design, creating a large, open dreamscape where the player floats downwards. This parametric approach allowed me to efficiently place collectibles, asteroids, and hazardous tentacles along splines with random variation, directing the player's movement through the vast space.
Minotaur
Minotaur is a simple game experience that served as my earliest experiment with embedded analytics. For this project, I built a system that records play sessions and sends summary data back to a Clowder server. This work enabled long-term data collection, and the results from over three years and thousands of play sessions are analyzed in this report.
The Madvent Calendar
An ornate launcher for the inaugural Madvent event in 2020, an annual Haunted PS1 collaboration where ~30 developers release small games daily throughout December. For this first event, I coordinated the project and built the launcher application to house the collection of games.
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 nature of the narrative was a gratifying success, 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.
The Peoples Tree
The People's Tree was the first in a series of experimental games I created to explore community building in networked spaces. In this project, players design ornaments and leave messages on a shared tree. It was my first opportunity to build the underlying technology, develop content policies, and run analytics for a live, public-facing application. A key finding from this and subsequent projects was an unexpectedly high player return rate of 15-30%, suggesting that players felt a personal stake in the collectively-designed artifact and returned to observe its evolution.
Sloppy Joe
A prototype for a dungeon crawler set in the Rococo universe, created to test a unique ground-based movement mechanic. In this demo, I implemented a system where the player navigates on a rolling seat, bouncing off walls and turning in 90-degree increments. The project was also an experiment in pushing the Rococo aesthetic in a darker visual direction. The prototype can be played here.
Guccibytes
An exhibition and print zine showcasing unfinished speculative pieces from our studio organization, Quipit, with a focus on revealing the often-unseen digital components of our work. The zine was printed on long scrolls wrapped around PVC lattices, with embedded QR codes linking to AR content in Wikar. Each contributor used the platform differently: some created virtual galleries, others showed complex models on virtual plinths, and I created a "3D portal" to show one of my miniature models staged in its fictional setting. The physical exhibition components were built from materials recycled from a previous project.
Timeline Atlas
Two AR data-visualization sculptures visualizing datasets too complex to depict through physical sculpture: the home locations of all female senators over the past century. I collaborated with artist Stephen Cartwright, known for meticulously logging personal data over decades and crafting it into acrylic sculptures that exhibit spatial-temporal patterns. We used AR to surpass the limitations of his traditional manufacturing techniques. Debuted as part of a faculty showcase in 2019.
Wikar V1
The initial prototype for Wikar, an AR app I designed for viewing cloud-hosted media like artworks and design proposals. During an affiliation with the NCSA's Advanced Visualization Laboratory, I developed this first version to use NCSA's Clowder data repository for storing and distributing Unity asset bundles. The system uses QR codes for URL lookup and precise positioning, enabling multi-user, location-integrated experiences. The project, which received financial support from eDream and the Fiddler Foundation, has since been used by international artists, researchers, architects, and students.
The Austere
CRITICAL MASS Student Choice Award, 2018A speculative project that imagines a near-future of climate catastrophe where corporations provide prefabricated housing tied to labor contracts. Originally a design-build proposal for the U.S. Solar Decathlon, I reformulated the work to explore how speculative design could feel more imminent and unsettling. Instead of distant hyperbole, the project grounded its extreme scenario in plausible economic and social trends, positioning it between architectural proposal, narrative fiction, and propaganda artifact. Exhibited as a large-format presentation board and later as an augmented reality installation, the work won the Student Choice Award at Critical Mass in 2018.
Cyprus Pavilion: Seoul Biennale
A lightweight VR installation featuring a 3D-printed, stereogram-inspired VR system that loops 360-degree stereo videos of climate modeling scenarios and disasters unfolding within a virtual model of Nicosia. I designed the system while assisting the VELab at the Cyprus Institute for the Cyprus Pavilion at the Seoul Biennale.
DM_Fazole
A minimalist HL2DM map with many looping and interwoven paths, designed to be as simple looking as the gameplay felt while breaking away from the grungy aesthetic of other maps. I built this in a weekend with a low memory footprint—about 1% the typical filesize of a map—though it was far too strange to get love from HL2DM players.
CS_Crapmaps
Crap maps night—a tradition where we made bad or interesting maps once a year and played through them together. I was part of Interlopers, an online group that developed mods and indie games around Valve's Source Engine in the 2000s.
MG_Oceantop
A minigame map I created where players have no weapons and must try to survive as falling blocks topple sections of the map.
Nightmare House 2
A skybox for a free horror indie game that replaces the outside environment, working at ground level and when on top of a tall tower. I created the skybox using a combination of Vue rendering and photocollage with a program called Skypaint which manages perspective-correction when editing.
Source Engine Skyboxes
Skyboxes for the Source engine built using Terragen, Vue, and photocollage, along with 360 panoramic images from my own camera. I created these for personal projects, friend's projects, and mods during my earliest experiences with Photoshop and art making from ~2008-2010. A friend bundled the materials I had distributed into one package.
GM_Flatsky
A large, open grassy plane with a custom skybox, which was the first public map I ever created.