Want a quick look at the highlights of the stuff I’ve made? You’re in the right place.
Here’s three examples of my work that demonstrate the skills that I’m eager to bring to the table. There’s more where that came from—an absurd firehose of more, linked at the end—but I’ve selected these three as a sort of high-octane tour of what I can do for your game-or-product-or-company-et-cetera.
Enjoy!
The Dungeon Beneath Tour Toriel
This is the first adventure in a tutorial megadungeon, and it demonstrates my chops with tutorials, instructional text, and tightly-focused setting and dramatic design.
The Cortex Prime Roleplaying Game is a highly adaptable but also very complex tabletop roleplaying game. New players frequently ask two questions: “how do I teach my players Cortex?” and “how do you do a dungeon crawl in Cortex?” I decided to fill that niche.
Level by level, the players guide their hardy adventurers through the megadungeon of Tour Toriel. Each level they learn new rules and engage in more complex interactions of rules. At the same time, the characterization of their heroes develops and deepens, as do the details of the world they operate in. Everything in the game—mechanics, characters, world, options, story—keeps getting more complicated, but always at a comprehensible pace.
The first adventure in the series, The Dungeon Beneath Tour Toriel, is a free download on itch.io. I’m happy to share the others with you if you really want to dig in, but the first one should give you a pretty good idea.
The Vicious Crucible of Villa Argentate
Villa Argentate is an example of my worldbuilding and macroscopic game design, presenting elements atomically. This is the best example of my work where it’s easy to see all the pieces on their own as well as in the collective context.
The big idea behind the Vicious Crucible series is to create a modular, extensible tabletop roleplaying game. In each chapter, players take on the roles of characters already enmeshed in a complicated and grabby situation, which gets them right into the action. Each chapter uses a common core mechanic and introduces a special mechanic that is especially apt for the story the players will be caught up in. That special mechanic can be used in later chapters as well, even when that story element is no longer in the spotlight.
Each chapter also has a cool map, because hey: cool maps, right?
The chapters can be played in any order, and their local settings are loosely interlinked in a shared world. The characters in each chapter have ties to the places and people in other chapters, facilitating a sense of place, interconnection, and emotional significance.
There’s three Vicious Crucibles, but Villa Argentate is my favorite:
Void Vultures
This tabletop roleplaying game is a good example of my level design and some of my more… enthusiastic writing. The game demonstrates how I design any given level, scenario, or adventure as a story the players can move around in, poke at interesting bits, and explore. They’re inevitably drawn into taking exciting action, at which point they become a part of the story themselves.
The basic schtick of this game is a dungeon crawl in space (“Kill Space Monsters and Take Their Space Stuff!”), with the eponymous void vultures being scavengers who board derelict space stations to strip them of anything valuable. Said space stations are inevitably infested, dangerous, or about to explode. It is not a subtle game.
It’s presented in a simple print-and-play format that assumes rule sheets can be passed around the table.
Here’s one encounter in the Derelicts of the Void series of adventures.
There’s tons more in the full game, which is free to download here. The Lost Expedition adventure is an especially good example of plot development through an adventure.
But Wait, There’s More!
Almost all of my creative output for which I retained the rights is now on my itch.io page as a free download. It’s just easier selling everything as Pay What You Want, and this way I never worry about some poor kid who can’t access my stuff. That also means that it’s really easy for you to poke around a lot of what I’ve made. I’m always happy to chat about any of these.
Also on my itch.io page are what I call “browser games” which are video games that can be played in web browsers. These are individual efforts, with me doing every element on my own, usually in a tight time frame like a game jam. They are made out of JavaScript, HTML, and SVG, and they are rough. But I do like to think that the underlying game design shines through.
Thanks for taking the time to peruse my portfolio!
—Miriam