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. BACKBONE is my contribution to C.H.A.I.N. 3, a collaborative network where each developer builds a game world connected to others through doors. Continuing directly from the network's starting game, it expanded the exposition and connected to three other games. 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 with enemy AI that uses a finite state machine and procedural, physics-based animation. Within the network, BACKBONE bridges multiple narrative threads and establishes mechanical systems used by subsequent developers.
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.
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 co-constructive virtual places for heritage, featuring a "propositional model" for directing public knowledge toward 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 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 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 series—where players design items and place them in a shared digital space—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 better panning and zooming, recoloring and reskinning the visual aesthetic, and optimizing data serialization and loading sequences. The project marks my transition from lead developer to technical consultant as the junior team took over coordination.
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 before the site and its permanent VR exhibit 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 development on this remake of my 2023 C.H.A.I.N.G.E.D. entry. 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
The launcher for the 2023 Madvent event, an annual Haunted PS1 collaboration where ~30 creators release games daily throughout December. With co-developer Vladimere Lhore, 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 was an opportunity to explore motion-captured camera work, gameplay-to-music synchronization, a blocking system for sequencing events, and vector-based rendering.
The People's Sky
The fourth iteration of the People's Tree series, The People's Sky is an experimental game where players design items, append messages, and place them in a shared digital sky. A key design change was constraining the color palette to reduce the visual cacophony of earlier iterations. I also developed data-transfer optimizations, analytic logs for post-experiment analysis, a web application for content moderation, and 'trace' visualizations that passively record and display player exploration paths.
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 effective tools for participatory research beyond 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 early 20th 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, my augmented reality platform for viewing 3D content in real-world spaces, 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—a survey format where participants both vote on and submit new options, so the survey evolves as people interact with it. This implementation draws on two prior systems (All Our Ideas and POLIS) and adds AI-assisted seed generation and automated qualitative coding. I developed this web application as part of the MetaFraming research.
Haunted PS1 Demo Disc: Spectral Mall
A first-person horror game set in an abandoned mall, built as the launcher for the 2022 Haunted PS1 Demo Disc—a curated collection of games selected from hundreds of community submissions. Each contributed game appears as a locked storefront procedurally scattered throughout the mall; the player solves puzzles and acquires tools to unlock them. With co-director Cyreides leading much of the art, I was responsible for all gameplay programming, technical materials, and organizing the broader collaborative effort.
Córdoba Court
Córdoba Court is a social game I designed and developed as the third iteration of the People's Tree series, modeled after the communal patios of Córdoba, Spain. Players cultivate a shared virtual environment by designing personalized totems from a combinatorial system of parts. The project was released simultaneously through the Haunted PS1 community and as part of the DARIAH Udigish Working Group's survey on Córdoba's communal patios, serving as a social experiment in shared digital space and community greening. A report is also available, which analyzes player content and observed behaviors.
Madvent Calendar 3: Necrosis
The launcher for the 2022 Madvent event, an annual Haunted PS1 collaboration where ~30 creators release games daily throughout December. Set in a city of skyscrapers, the player clicks stained glass windows on their facades, each window a contributed game. With co-developer Vladimere Lhore, I organized the event and built the launcher application.
Arcade Cabinet
An arcade cabinet designed for exhibiting contemporary art games. The key detail is a 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 that lets stakeholders view expected energy loads for every room in a heritage building over the year using a phone or tablet. A slider scrubs through a full year of data, built to explain green infrastructure investments for the adaptive reuse project. More information on the project can be found here.Technical: I baked 3D room volumes into an optimized mesh whose vertex UVs encode positions on a packed lookup texture for GPU-driven animation without CPU overhead. The project also showcased Wikar's 3D section slicer, which recomposes standard shaders into slicable equivalents using 3D SDF intersections with a stencil pass for back-face fill.
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, I provided Wikar 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 co-design process helped the local campus community collect a public voice for preserving the open space, and the site opened as a public space in October 2022. Conference presentation and publication documented the methodology.
The People's Tree 2
The second iteration of the People's Tree project, an experimental game where participants design ornaments and leave messages on a communal tree in a shared digital space. For this iteration, I rebuilt the underlying technology, expanded content moderation policies, and added more detailed analytics on player behavior.
Haunted PS1 Demo Disc 2021
A first-person exploration game set in an old museum, built as the launcher for the 2021 Haunted PS1 Demo Disc—a curated collection of games selected from hundreds of community submissions. Modeled after the Namco Museum series, the launcher recreates its presentation and input style, with each contributed game appearing as a miniature diorama scattered throughout the space. As project lead, I organized the collaborative effort and wrote most of the gameplay code and infrastructure, with Bryce Bucher leading art direction and Modus Interactive contributing key art.
Where's Home?
An experimental game prototype conceived as the next evolution of the People's Tree series. Where previous iterations had players designing ornaments for a shared space, this version reimagined the format around NPCs: players meet characters throughout an abstracted version of Union Station in Chicago, ask them questions, and contribute answers that populate other players' encounters—so the station gradually fills with player-authored characters to discover. The game translated the unshaded, minimalist aesthetic of Rococo into a more detailed architectural style. For the prototype, I developed a custom Rhinoceros plugin to export modular architectural elements, and a separate system to place around 100 unique characters throughout the scene. The project was shelved to allow for more design iteration on its dialogue system.
2 Madvent 2 Calendar
The launcher for the second annual Madvent event, a Haunted PS1 collaboration where ~30 developers release small games daily throughout December. The player navigates a free-floating camera around cabins on a mountain, clicking each to launch its contributed game. With co-developer Vladimere Lhore, I coordinated the project and built the launcher application.
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. When viewed through a phone, the painting comes alive with particles that shift and flow based on live magnetic field data. I developed the coding and visuals for Eli Joteva.Technical: Live sensor intensities are baked into packed textures so particles animate by interpolating a texture index on the GPU, keeping the visualization real-time without CPU overhead.
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 gave their tacit knowledge an empirical basis, 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 the single interaction feel complete — custom shaders create an unlit, candy-colored look, and a physics-driven sound system 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 space.
Minotaur
Minotaur is a digital marble maze inspired by the classic BRIO Labyrinth board game, where players tilt a board to navigate a ball around holes. It also served as my earliest experiment with embedded analytics—I built a system that records play sessions and sends summary data to a Clowder data repository. 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
The launcher for the inaugural Madvent event in 2020, an annual Haunted PS1 collaboration where ~30 developers release small games daily throughout December. The player navigates a free-floating camera around a pile of houses stacked in the shape of a tree—an advent calendar where each house is a contributed game that unlocks on its calendar day. I coordinated the project and built the launcher—an application that compiles builds from all contributors, unifies the experience, and manages launching, monitoring, and progress tracking across the full collection.
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.
The People's 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 world of Rococo (my earlier surreal kitchen platformer), 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 go beyond 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 National Center for Supercomputing Applications' (NCSA) 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 Half-Life 2: Deathmatch 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% of 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.