My 2023 Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp) entry was not ranked very highly by players that year; the interface mechanism I built for it was a formal experiment that many found disorienting, and bugs plagued its initial release. Now, after having revised the technology, the story is easier to see, and the systems easier to appreciate. The result, “Out of Scope,” is a thematically complex branching narrative about which forms of love and violence our society condones, and which it condemns. It follows the downfall of the Carnation family, and your effort as one of the family’s star-crossed scions to put […]

In 2023, I was on a team that released an educational game for middle school kids as part of a grant-funded project by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to advertise Fort Stanton Cave, a natural landmark in New Mexico. I was the principal programmer on the Academy project, an adaptation of Ron Lipinski’s Caver Quest simulation for the Fort Stanton Cave Study Project. I created or revised many of the character and prop 3D models and animations, scripted new character controllers, customization, and interactions, implemented new systems such as quizzes, collection minigames, rewards, a generic save and load API, […]

I was commissioned by game designer Thomas Stavlo to prototype a multiplayer client for his deck-building game. The setting is steampunk-meets-Game of Thrones, wherein the player has taken to the air in a crystal-powered airship to defeat his or her rivals through either total domination or by scoring reputation from broadside hits and evading or deflecting blows from pretenders to the throne. The complex game features made for a lot of fun engineering: turn based gameplay across a network; lots of animation; cards that, when played, produce special turns that require choices; support for more than two players; an AI […]

I’ve always loved fantasy maps, many of which are hand drawn or are tailored to look like it. Part of this hand drawn style are clear, but sketchy outlines around objects, and then perhaps a textured fill for shingles on a house, the foliage of a tree, or the running water in a stream. Another frequent element is soft shadows that, even if the map is represented without perspective from above, communicate the depth or height of the terrain or objects in it, and allow for the time of day to change. (Free fantasy map example reference from Jonathan Roberts’s […]

This portfolio makes it fairly plain that I’m interested in both creative writing and creative technology, but my most ardent dream is to bring them together whenever possible. Sometimes it’s a pretty fruitless quest, as the tribulations of luminaries like Chris Crawford, who has dedicated (some would say wasted) his life to do the same. Others, like Emily Short or Andrew Plotkin, have written interactive fiction for years, and even made a career out of it, but in every new work the interface between technology and narrative remains vexing. Authoriality pushes, and interactivity pulls. One of the big challenges for […]

The screens below are from a job for AGM Container Controls, who spend thousands to transport their Ascension line of wheelchair accessibility lifts to trade shows and exhibitions, where they would need to additionally have to be assembled and disassembled. AGM’s technical specialist, Estevan Gregory, had the idea to instead showcase its products in VR, providing a similar experience to potential customers in an environment of their choosing. My modeler friend Danny Adelman and I were contracted to build the experience. I created a generic interactivity system that could be used to control single-input movement controls for even the most […]

Since taking on the game design and game programming classes at Pima Community College, I’ve met a wonderful variety of students, and a few of them have been tremendously talented. In order to better promote enrollment at the college and to celebrate these bedestined aspirants, I created a trailer for last year’s cohort that showcases some of the superb work they created in just over a year. Even the music was composed and sequenced by students. Each year, the graphic intro I created for the trailer would increase in scope with my own skills: For the first trailer, I scripted […]

Reunited with my inestimable partner Chris Hill for a second game jam (after the success of Pyramid Scheme), we set about creating our next experiment with a new process in mind: script-first design. Instead of starting with game mechanics and coating them with story, we decided to try creating the content first and then fashioned a mechanism to leverage it. It was scary not to have a mechanism built in Unity to fill – we put a lot of faith in a fairly new intermediate narrative engine called Ink – but thanks in large part to Chris’s whip-fast coding, the […]

It’s January 2017, the same weekend as the Women’s March protest and the weekend after Donald Trump is sworn into office as president of the USA. The Global Game Jam begins, and this year the theme is “waves.” Me and two other collaborators (Matt Jackson and Rachel Franco) create a game in the spirit of both making waves and finding peace in a dissonant world, called Harmony. The game is about getting in sync with the rhythm of the world around you and obtaining peace in the process. In the game, music plays and two colorful waves sweep across the […]

As Pyramid Scheme begins, you find yourself digging your own grave at gunpoint in the Sonoran Desert. It looks like this is the end for you until your shovel hits an odd object in the dirt: a tiny pyramid, no doubt buried there many millennia before (or perhaps it’s just trash that some tourist dropped here in the nineties). It seems to speak to you, to whisper in your mind, to fill you with the power to… be a life coach! Using your impressive new motivational skills, you convince your would-be killers to trade places with you, and soon you’re […]

TV Tycoon is a game simulation of network television management. You adopt the role of one of several television networks, each of which have different victory conditions and advantages / disadvantages. As the commissioner of that network, you choose how much to spend on new program development, where to schedule your shows on a virtual TV schedule, and whether to cancel or rearrange them based on their performance with different audience demographics. Random events affect your audience’s tastes and can interfere with or assist the ongoing production of your television shows. Detailed data about the performance of your shows and […]

The polluted, ravaged Earth may no longer be habitable, but Chiron, the closest planet to Proxima Centauri B, offers some hope for the future of the human race. A generation ship, on which the remnants of our race persist by a fragile thread, has finally arrived after two hundred years at its destination star. But humanity’s nature – our nobility, our determination, our ingenuity, yes, but also our greed and our terrible arrogance – jeopardize the success of the mission. When competing ideologues on board the Unity literally tear it apart before planetfall, the few thousand survivors who reach Chiron’s […]

Sun and Moon is the best app for playing Legend of the Five Rings online. It lets you flip, bow, sift, and stack cards with natural gestures, while making it easy to connect to other players and test decks. THE STORY: About this time last year, I created its antecedent for my good friend Ben. Ben got me into the L5R CCG when I was thirteen years old. Those of us inspired by his enthusiasm, however, eventually went separate ways, and playing L5R online has always been a haphazard affair. No longer, I hope! Thanks to encouragement from this coterie, […]

Outside of Norwich, in East Anglia, are the fens: rich silty wetland disposed to farming. The boundary between the city and the country is pronounced by accent, by politics, and by ancient history. Gemma Hardacre, 22, once crossed that boundary to get her sociology degree, and now she returns, a published but unemployable academic. On the way, she almost runs over a youth (a “chav”) on the road, who fixates on her. The chav follows her back to her parents’ farm and hires on as a hand. Gemma’s anxieties about returning home to her parents, about her role and her […]

Game of Zones is about the vicissitudes of power in a hierarchical social system wherein only the conniving and the morally destitute may survive. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s a goofy parody of Game of Thrones set in an Apple Store, created in 2013 as tribute to my friend Patrick for his years of kindness as my colleague and manager. In the RPG, you undertake to find the missing code for the manager’s office before the store opens. Talk to your coworkers to unravel the mystery of who locked the door and why, and stumble across in-jokes that anyone […]

Hans Christian Andersen’s first fairy tale was the perfect inspiration for this little comic strip. It’s about a soldier who discovers a tinder box that, when struck, summons a supernatural dog to fetch him his heart’s desire. He uses it to steal gold, then the princess of a kingdom, and finally the crown. Thing is, this soldier, when you read between the lines, is kind of a psychopath. He chops off a witch’s head for not being straight with him, kidnaps girls, and later decides to murder an entire court to escape its justice. I was intrigued – what kind […]

Liz is 15 and her boyfriend Justin has just moved to Australia. Her working class friends and bankrupt mom team up to buy her a mobile phone so she can keep in touch with him. Liz doesn’t waste their good will. She’s always on the phone, but at the same time she starts to get sick: moods take her and she grows impatient with her best friend Alice, and suspicious of her boyfriend. As the series develops, we meet Elizabeth, the agent for a phone company called Millennial Telecom, who is tasked to watch Liz from afar. The company believes […]

Quinzy crawls into his school backpack one day looking for some missing homework and emerges in a labyrinthine wonderland: the inside of his mind. There’s a library (his knowledge), a furnace (his temper), a game of chess in progress alone in an empty ballroom, and a locked door leading deeper. He spends more and more time there, learning about himself through the artifacts of his subconscious, and who can blame him? After all, he has to deal with getting good grades, a girl who won’t stop harassing him, a brother in the hospital, and parents who don’t know what they […]

1836. Harland Shiels is the owner of a company that produces pantomime in Newcastle’s new Grainger Town. He runs comedy half the week, has a devout wife, and two children away at boarding school in London. But he’s been having bad dreams… One night, tossing and turning, he hears the clatter of horses’ hooves, trumpets, then great fires burning, screams, the splutters of children with plague. Greta, his wife, wakes him to a day that will not break. Darkness has come to England. Greta fears the apocalypse, and is anxious to leave Newcastle immediately for London to be with their […]

One character. One location. Five minutes. Click is a short film about a university student who gets locked in a basement bathroom while trying to find his Psych class. When you read the ending you’ll agree that it could just have easily been called Twist. In Spring 2011 the script was produced as part of the Virgin Media Shorts competition by James Gorman (director) and Paul Cook (producer), with Matt Downton as the student. Watch it here.

Exile is an epic fantasy about being outcast, and the part it plays in growing up. It’s about what people do when they’re taken from where they belong. It’s also a place, a land deep below the earth: a penal colony for the omnipotent Empire. This 13-part, 60-minute TV serial follows Erika (17) and Ferris (19) through a medieval world of swords, secrets, jealous wars and magic. Erika is a budding mage, an individual gifted with powers that seem to have a life and motive of their own. These powers drag her against her will from humble beginnings into the […]

“Shame and Sorcery” is the second hour of Exile, an epic fantasy series in 13 parts about being outcast, and the part it plays in growing up. In the first episode, “Crying Wolf,” Erika is cast into the underworld for using magic to murder another, and Ferris returns to his family’s court at Tenet with Erika’s mageward. The ward begins to manipulate him, trying to reunite with its owner. The second episode begins with Ferris chafing against its influence and the equally oppressive influence of his mother, the Queen of Tenet, who has sent him on another clandestine mission to […]

The Journeyman Project is about whether human beings can ever really improve, as individuals or as a people. At the beginning of the 23rd century, it appears that they may have. In one last, bloody world war, unified countries in the West annihilated those in the East with nuclear weapons. Sickened by the conditions of their victory, the borders between the remaining countries began to come down and a unified world government was formed, albeit a Western one. During the scientific renaissance that follows, human beings make their most dangerous discovery yet: the time machine. Realizing its potential to change […]

Sherlock Holmes (17) and James Moriarty (also 17) are best friends. They’re on the trail of a mysterious smuggler operating in the East India Company Docklands, a dangerous and forbidden part of London polluted by the refuse of the Victorian steampunk revolution. Together, nothing can stop Holmes and Moriarty, not even the fierce matron of their dormitory at Long Hall college, but when they’re apart, it’s a different story, and The Question of the Future is a very different story indeed. James’s estranged father returns to take care of his son after James’s mother is killed by a criminal in […]

In under five minutes, seven year-old James goes on a quest to find Jesus, discovers who his father really is, and pinches a biscuit. A short film about growing up before you were meant to, as we all do.

God, Valentine’s Day is stressful, especially when you’re thirteen years old and being chased all the way to your house by a bully that you just can’t shake. This short film comes in at well under five minutes and has no dialogue, just like a good Valentine’s Day gift should.

Doctor Who has not been so soapy in a while. The revelation that River is Amy’s daughter who is also “part time lord” and also his potential lover is an Emmerdale-class contortion, with time travel as the soap advert that makes it all possible. It’s cleverly done, but the hallmarks are there, in A Good Man Goes to War especially. It’s a “greatest hits” finale where old characters that you probably won’t even remember die so the Doctor can realize something about himself. One of them points out that the Doctor makes a mockery of the word “doctor” as “healer […]

My friend Brian Danin is a talented photographer, web designer, film director, editor and producer. His website, BZD Productions, is ripe with content and a media blog that he asks me to contribute to every once in a while. As long as I’ve known Brian he’s also been an entrepreneur, so these articles of mine from BZD, which focus on the TV and New Media industries, fit right in. I thought they’d fit in here, too, as examples of some solid online criticism.

Selection from a transposition of The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle into modern Norfolk. One of the fun things about adaptation, especially of canonical literature or genre fiction, is reading all the criticism about a work. I picked up on one journal article’s thesis, which was that The Last Unicorn was about reasserting the idea of magic in modern fiction where it had lost parlance to cynical, nostalgic, scientific, and nihilistic narratives. Transposing it to Norfolk was about identifying “lost magic” in this part of England. I eventually settled on legends about explorers, an uncanny number of whom come […]

The first poem in this set is the most “constrictive.” It uses a playful device that I don’t think has ever been used before: breaking up compound words into phonetic components that lend their own meaning to the sentence. It’s best read aloud for this reason. The remainder of the poems are not in any particular vein, merely that they are in some measure “constrictive” and happen to have been written around the same time…

In Heaven and Earth, you play an underestimated patsy flung into a position of power in a galactic naval conflict. When you fail to drown, your allegiance is courted by both sides: the religious progeny of mankind, exiled from Earth, and the atheist usurpers who displaced them. Command fleets of customizable ships. Manage their systems in realtime (with pause) on an abstract tactical map. Outflank, use formations, micromanage individual abilities on equipment, earn and spend on outfitting: fight outnumbered and outgunned, but never outwitted. Reveal a rich, literary story about the role of belief systems in a universe where “heaven” […]

Clear as Day is one of my most traditional stories. Ironically, it is also one of my favorite. The style, which has a whiff of Flannery O’Connor about it (which is not to say, decay), is supposed to be clear and direct in its language, but still a little tough to catch at heart.

The Spider Web took me about four months to finish. It’s in the same class as The Best Way to Travel: it’s a long, somewhat experimental story that revels in rich language and grotesque characters. The idea of it comes from my last year in Vancouver. I was living in a basement suite that, especially at the beginning of the year, was full of all sorts of spiders. They’d turn up all over the place—mutlitudes of them, every day. I tolerated a few of them that had woven webs in convenient places—that is to say not in my bed. All […]

I wasn’t sure about this story for a few months after I wrote it. It was a little too straightforward for my taste. About half way into the story, I discovered that I had no idea what was going to happen next, and about three-quarters of the way in, I then realized that I had to end it soon or I would miss my deadline. A couple of years later, I think it holds up rather well despite these things. Perhaps this is because it is in fact quite easy to read. Or perhaps it is because of all the […]

Writing directly, even minimally, is very in vogue these days. There are lots of clear writers, including my favorite writer of all time, Flannery O’Connor, but I am not so sold on the philosophy. I have a fondness for convolution. While I have avoided it in recent years (because it is very unpopular), I still frequently dip in during those moments where it might be appropriate: a reverie, a moment of madness, a climax, or as a trick when shifting point of view. So I recognized that I could use some practice with minimalism and wrote The Red Agenda before […]

Just before my 3rd year at University, I had made the first of several identical decisions over the years: I was going to put other things away and Become a Writer. I was waiting to hear from the University of British Columbia’s Creative Writing department about my undergraduate application that summer, and I was determined that even if I didn’t get in, I would dedicate my free time to, among other things like maybe writing a story, reading the dictionary from cover to cover. So I could be the best writer ever. Ha! A nagging voice—the voice of proportion and […]

This story itself keeps a short leash on its structure and theme. That luxury is afforded partly because of its length, but I’d like to take some credit and say that I quite like it. It’s “edgy” in the most literal sense: the subject of the story spends the whole time on the edge of something dangerous or other, and the central question is really, “will they go over?”

One of the workshop stipulations in my last UBC fiction course was that there should be no genre fiction. This blanket statement was put out there I believe to staunch fan fiction, or anything crassly plagiaristic. This story tries to skirt around brands like that, but still be hyper-stylized fiction, filled with ingredients that approach, but never fall squarely on cliche. I spent a lot of time on the style of the piece—more so than on figuring out what was going to happen with the story. It was supposed to be one of those grand-concept science fictions that twist hard […]

Handle With Care is a strange story, not least because it’s unfinished. It’s an interesting example of form-driven storytelling. I didn’t start this story, as I often do, with a scene or a theme or even a character. This story started with a rhythm. I let the language tell me where the story should go. It turned out much better than you might expect. That is: it actually makes sense. I ended up with a story that probably could not have been created any other way than it had . . . a world where people and places are shipped […]

In May of 1889, U.S. Marshal W.K. Meade reported that “Major Wham Paymaster U.S. army was attacked on the eleventh about thirty miles north of Fort Grant,” where he and ten buffalo soldiers were pinned down by armed robbers. After the firefight, Meade was horrified to find eight soldiers wounded and $28,345 (over half a million dollars today) of the army’s payroll stolen. From his base in Tucson’s federal courthouse, Meade makes it his personal mission to bring the outlaws to justice. Meade has a reputation as the most relentless of lawmen, but his requests for more men, more time, […]

This is a spec script for the critically-acclaimed Sci Fi television show Battlestar Galactica. It takes place in between episodes 14 and 15 in the second season of the show and ties up some loose ends in a fairly loose part of the season, to be honest. After review, I decided that I would make some specific changes to the script if I ended up returning to it, possibly to send out in a writing portfolio to some TV network or producer, or to whomever you’re supposed to send scripts (in the US, the answer to that seems to be […]

I don’t write lots of poetry. Most of it comes from high school, when in withdraw after a year with a great English teacher I would write on the lengthy bus ride home. I’ve included a few of those poems, perhaps incredibly, in this collection that is half meant for children and half about them. There are some good poems in here. “Calisthenes” is my favorite. Absurdly, it’s probably the poem that took the least time to create. “Elizabeth Sonnet” has got quite a good form (for which we must thank Shakespeare mostly). And several of them are nonsense, but […]

HWSTN started out primarily as a blog. My posts featured, more often than promised updates about my life for my family and friends, thoughts about this new show called Battlestar Galactica. Five years later, it’s finished its final season. Galactica has always been an inspiration, even in its shaky third season, because it never got great ratings but survived as a critical darling (and on who knows how much prayer). Most of my thoughts on earlier episodes are scattered on the winds of the internet, but my impressions on the latest and last season of the show are recorded here […]

“Ambient Darkness” is the second episode of an hour-long television series Serial that I helped create, pitch, and flesh out in my final year of undergraduate school under the tutelage of Canadian screenwriter Frank Borg. I worked with a fairly unlikely and diverse team that included two Film Production students and a friend of mine who worked mainly with comedy. The premise of the show resembles that of an Agatha Christie novel, with guests converging at an old house for a special event, becoming trapped, and then gradually being killed off episode by episode. As the options for who the […]

You’re a bastard. You’ve never known your father. Then one day, to your surprise, you’re summoned to his funeral. You decide to go, and after a lengthy journey find yourself at a mansion in the Scottish highlands, miles away from civilization, in the dead of winter. The house staff lead you to an awkward service with an open casket and seven complete strangers. When the service is over, and your father’s corpse is in the ground, some shocking information makes this uncomfortable day take a turn for the worse: Those seven strangers are actually siblings that you’ve never known. Your […]

You are not yourself. Yourself is someone else, someone comfortable and far away. Someone warm and dry, and safe. Someone sheltered. You are no one, at least no one you know. You have been floating in the ocean for as long as you can remember, hoping to your far away self that the salt water and the seaweed and your sunburnt skin was a dream. But if it is, then maybe you are part of the dream, and will disappear at its merciful end. You have just washed from the cold ocean onto a burning beach that admits no sign […]

A twelve year-old girl worries that her imaginary companion, a brash, aggressive reflection of herself (a warrior, so to speak) needs to go. She’s a bad influence, always causing trouble while she catches the blame. As you can see, reading this, it’s hard to tell them apart. When she succeeds in removing her from her life through a meticulously stacked bet, she discovers that without that half of herself, she’s ill-equipped to deal with the problems she once endured: tension between her parents, her crush’s interest in another girl, and her teacher’s wayward expectations. It takes a surreal imagination and […]