Languages and Libraries

• Fluent: Flash Actionscript 2/3, Python,
• Familiar: C++, SDL, Panda3D, OpenGL, PHP, HTML, CSS.

Concepts and Principles

• Adept: Object-oriented programming and design.
• Familiar: User interface design, artificial intelligence.

Education

Master of Entertainment Technology

Carnegie Mellon University, graduated May 2008

An interdisciplinary program encompassing technology and the arts, with an emphasis on interactive media.

Bachelor in Computer Science

Harvey Mudd College, graduated May 2006

Client Work and Employment

Senior Web Developer, Web Developer

Illusion Factory, Jan 2008 – Sept 2009

Developed websites and Flash games for clients from existing specifications and graphic designs. Wrote specifications and documentation to clarify client requirements and aid development. Led development of several projects. Coworkers frequently consulted me for assistance with software design and programming tasks.

Graduate Associate, Creative Development

Disney Interactive Studios, June-December 2007

Developed game concepts for new and existing Disney properties, and created pitch presentations for them.

Endo Patrol: Immunology Video Game

Regenerative Medicine Partnership in Education, January-May 2007

Designed and implemented the user interface for a video game to teach 9-14 year-olds immunology. Done for a semester-long project course at Carnegie Mellon.

Object-Based Storage Device Simulator

Sandia National Laboratories, September 2005 to May 2006

Designed and implemented the load generator for a supercomputer storage device simulator in C++. Done for a year-long project course at Harvey Mudd College.

Elixir Vitae

Professor Elizabeth Sweedyk at Harvey Mudd College, May to July 2005

Programmed an adventure game to teach college freshmen about protein synthesis. Used the C++-based Adventure Game Studio engine.

Course Work

Building Virtual Worlds

September to December 2006, Carnegie Mellon University, Building Virtual Worlds

Created small virtual worlds in two-week rounds. Primary duty was sound and music designer. Also acted as producer and secondary scripter. Worlds included Predator vs. Alien, Prisoner of War, ArtZooka, Treasure Quest, and Turtle vs. Crab.

Astral Schism

April 2005, Harvey Mudd College, Gender in Game Design

In a team, designed and created violent and non-violent versions of a side-scrolling game. My duties were composer, artist, and game balancer.

Available: Astral Schism

PyMotion

October 2004, Harvey Mudd College, Harmony of Sound and Light

Designed a system using Python SDL to create John-Whitney-esque visual music. Wrote a short piece using the system.

Available: http://selenetan.com/portfolio/pymotion.html

Awards

Bully Pulpit Games Owlbear Game Design Challenge

Second Place, August 2006

National Novel Writing Month

Winner, November 2004, 2009

Another thing I admire about Emily Short is that she’s clearly no stranger to the technical side of game development. There are a lot of people writing about games, but I like the kind of analysis you get from someone who programs.

In high school, I tested as a pretty clear INTP. Now, though there are times when I feel more like the descriptions of INFPs, in addition to the times when I feel INFP is way too touch-feely for me. So I guess I’m more like INtP, or INxP, or some other thing where that’s fuzzy.

Anyway, gaming. I think I approach gaming as an INTJ. So, characters over setting; broad concepts over details; strategy and logic; clear rules and procedures over open-endedness. What helped me figure out my gaming-type was thinking about my fantasy heartbreaker, Song of Ethera; it’s pretty much an expression of “what I find cool in RPGs”. It’s pretty much character-based with a really loose setting, and based on encouraging lateral thinking for effective use of resources. I’m also trying to incorporate a strong structure that supports both the players and the GM. I’m pretty strongly J when it comes to gaming. I flounder when left to my own devices and end up not doing anything interesting. It’s probably why I tend to be uncomfortable with freeform.

I’ve played various characters in many games; a lot of them seem to default to “hyper-me”, which has merits, but hasn’t led to the most satisfying play experiences. I keep trying to play extraverts and generally freeze up when I’m trying to do “real roleplaying” with them. Then my introverts end up fading into the background instead. Gar. But anyway, the character I’ve had the most fun with is, I think, an ENFJ. Whoo.

So what does this say about me? Well, the IIE slice is probably me going “I wish I were better with people”. Brand described it as escapist, which sounds about right to me. My longest-running character is a D&D bard with 25 Charisma and Epic Leadership, meaning she has over a hundred level 1 followers. So, yeah.

The PJJ slice is kind of interesting. Brand mentioned this, I think, but it’s kind of like… My life is sooo not together, let’s try to be together in the game. So structure is really important for me. And I tend to have more fun with characters who go out and make big decisions.

There’s tTF, which is, um, thingie. I guess I like playing characters who can be touchy-feely, but I still construct their behavior logically. It’s not like I’m a nerd or anything. (Yeah, right!) I also don’t really immerse in characters; my best play has come when I distance myself from my characters, rather than trying to “be my character”, which just makes me freeze up.

NNN… “Details? What details?”

What I like in games: tactical-ish thingies. Combining different resources or abilities to come up with a new, cool thing. (e.g. feat/spell “combos” in D&D) Feeling like I make a difference. Kewl Powerz.

I am bad at writing conclusions.

This is an art critique I wrote for an introductory art class I took.

“Sleepy Kitten” is a black-and-white photograph by Patryck Mena, also known as drsmith. It was posted to the online gallery deviantART in August, 2005. (The work is viewable at http://www.deviantart.com/view/22174477/.)

The photograph has a black outline and white border, with photographer’s name in a white handwriting-style font in the lower-right corner. The website uses a neutral, gray, theme, which offsets the works it displays. The photograph shows a close-up of a sleeping kitten on some presumably soft surface, like a blanket. The kitten is leaning against a plush cow. Details other than the kitten and cow are blurry and out-of-focus.

The artist owns the kitten and has taken many photographs of it at various stages in life. The artist also takes a lot of macro photographs. He sometimes alters his photographs digitally for artistic purposes.

As a black-and-white photograph, Sleepy Kitten relies largely on value, shape, mass and texture. Color, of course, is missing, and the fact that the work is a photograph means that the use of lines is not as important as the use of contrasting values. The kitten and its blanket have similar values, but the kitten’s texture is different, enabling it to be distinguished from the background. The delineation is relatively soft, compared to the distinction between the kitten and the stuffed cow.

The kitten’s head is approximately centered in the frame, but it is leaning and turned to one side. The centering gives a sense of stillness and peace, but the tilt prevents the stillness from feeling artificial and posed.

The blurriness of the background emphasizes the kitten as a focal point. It also lends a very soft feeling to the piece. Most of the photograph is made up of grays, with only a few areas of pure white and even fewer of pure black. This enhances the photograph’s soft nature.

The choice of black and white for the photograph gives it a nostalgic air. Additionally, the photograph juxtaposes two elements we associate with childhood. There is the kitten, which is a child, and the stuffed cow. A sleeping kitten alone would not have provoked the depth of feeling in this photograph. Here, the kitten cuddles up to a stuffed cow, evoking childhood memories of cuddling up to a favorite stuffed toy or parent.

On a somewhat related note, I came across two interesting articles recently: Speed Kills, and Inappropriate Feedback Mechanism. The first article suggests that the best difficulty adjustment for action games is to adjust speed, since the hard part of action games is processing and determining the correct response to the situation in-game within a short time. The second article is a minor rant about the way that games punish players who are not as skilled as the hardcore gamers. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (a PS1 game) has a really good example of this. The beginning is a prologue section where you play through the final boss fight of the previous Castlevania game. Depending on how well you do, your character for the rest of the game will start out with different stats. The problem is that the prologue level acts as an inverse difficulty selector – the better you do, the better your starting stats, and the easier the rest of the game will be. I don’t play sidescrollers much, so I got whomped on the prologue level. An NPC had to pop in and heal me back to full health before I managed to defeat the boss, he was just that hard. When a friend (who plays those kinds of games much more often) took a look at my savegame, he remarked “Wow! Those are the lowest stats I’ve ever seen for Alucard!”

I recently finished Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance on the GBA. My total logged play time was 11 hours; that doesn’t count backtracking from saves after dying. However, I finished the game, and the castle was 199% complete. (Out of 200%, if you’re not familiar with the series.) Harmony of Dissonance has a very similar feel to SotN; it was the same team. However, HoD is significantly easier. I can’t put my finger on the reasons, since I don’t play many sidescrollers/platformers (most of them are too hard for me). One review I read claimed that in HoD, the enemies aren’t very hard to dodge, take few hits to kill, and give a lot of experience. The reviewer also complained that the HoD boss behaviour is not complicated enough; he bragged that he got through many of them without taking a single point of damage. However, I had a lot of fun with HoD. It was a sidescroller that was actually within my skill level. I’d have been happier with more plot, but it held my interest long enough that it can be added to the rather short list of “Games I’ve Actually Finished.”

Around the same time I started HoD, I tried out Metroid Fusion. One of my friends has been trying to get me to play Super Metroid on a SNES emulator for a long time; I’ve played a bit (much of it with him walking me through areas of the game), but it didn’t really grab me. Metroid Fusion has a stronger plot, and there’s a mission system that eliminates the “wander around aimlessly for no apparent reason” feeling I got from Super Metroid. (I got this feeling from HoD as well, but other game elements made up for it.) So I stuck with Metroid Fusion for a while, and then it got much too hard for me, so I quit. The two game series are somewhat similar; they both involve a fair amount of exploration, and progressing through the game involves finding and using various power-ups correctly. The main difference (at least in the SotN-like Castlevanias) as I see it is that the Castlevania characters have levels. In Metroid (by which I mean “the Metroid games I’ve played”), Samus gets minor bonuses in the form of more missiles somewhat frequently, and more health less frequently. There are finite numbers of these missile and health bonuses, and you have to explore to discover them. In Castlevania, you can get minor bonuses by leveling up, and to a lesser extent by finding equipment. The difference is that leveling up requires less skill on the part of the player than exploration does. It also gives me a greater sense of progress. In Metroid, an extra couple of missiles doesn’t mean anything to me, because I still can’t use them effectively. I still miss more than half the time, and it’s only the health bonus that let me kill enemies I couldn’t kill before, simply because I can stand there taking damage just long enough to kill them before they kill me. (Without the health bonus, it would be the other way around.) In Castlevania, a level up means that enemies do less damage to you, and you do more damage to them, and you can withstand more punishment. Leveling requires time rather than great skill; you can level up on the easy monsters you can already kill in order to become powerful enough for the harder ones. Exploration requires both skill and time, but it requires a great deal more skill. I’ve been blocked out of areas because I couldn’t manage a difficult jump, or because the enemies in the preceding room just kept slaughtering me. Essentially, levels give a player who falls somewhat short of the targeted skill level a way to succeed, if they’re willing to put in the time. Without them, or any similar compensating factor, the game is less forgiving, and much less fun. In Metroid, I felt like I was never improving in any significant way, because my character wasn’t improving that much, and neither were my skills. I doubt I’m ever going to get the hang of moves that require two or more buttons (such as charging, jumping, then shooting, or jumping and shooting while using a shoulder button to aim diagonally), and that means that the game is going to be really, really hard for me.

This is a little more rant-y than I’d have liked, but it’s something I wanted to write.

I’d meant to get more into game difficulty in CRPGs, but maybe I’ll save that for next time. I don’t think there’s one relatively simple answer to adjusting CRPG difficulty the way the author of the “Speed Kills” article claims there is for action games, but there’s obviously a difference.

As a side note, it feels like it’s been a while since I played a CRPG that I was happy with. HoD is actually the closest I’ve come to being satisfied recently, but it needed a great deal more in terms of plot and characterization. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is getting tedious; simple battles that I pretty much can’t lose still take 20 minutes to go through, and I’m not even cheesing for levels anymore! Star Ocean just wasn’t working for me, even with the skills and crafting; Suikoden II was closer, but the slow movement speed and lack of a viewable world map were driving me crazy every time I needed to go somewhere.

In any case, I’m slightly irked at the way that various schools (colleges and whatnot) seem to class game design in with, well the school of (graphic) design. (A lot of schools don’t mention the “graphic” part, but if you take a look at the courses, it’s obvious.) I feel that game design has much more in common with writing, filmmaking, acting, or even composing than it does with art. I think the main reason is that art is static. Games are not. A game without movement and change is boring and, arguably, not a game.

Of course, there might be the argument that website design is also lumped in there, and it seems to be doing fine. Or maybe not. I think it’s probably progressed more from research into user interfaces than it has from people making pretty pictures.

This makes me think of Chris Crawford’s article, The Tyranny of the Visual. Interesting points. The guy has a lot of other interesting articles in his library, although they’re not all good.

Anyway, I (kind-of) recently went to a talk by Michael Mateas, a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology with research interests in artificial-intelligence-based art and entertainment. He has a really cool game/interactive story, Facade. (It’s been displayed at conferences, but isn’t ready for mass distribution… He estimates it’ll be available as a free download early in 2004.) In the talk, he discussed some of the issues he had to deal with in implementing Facade. One of the points he brought up is that “designers are stuck on plot graphs.” (In math and computer science, a graph is a collection of nodes and “edges”, which are connections between nodes. Usually you see them drawn as circles or dots with connecting lines.) If you think about the storylines of most games, you can easily represent them as graphs. In fact, the game design book Swords and Circuitry describes different graphs you can use to structure your roleplaying and adventure games. (It doesn’t actually call them graphs, but they’re circles with arrows connecting to other circles.) The problem with graphs is that you end up with a fairly limited set of choices or way of interacting with the game. The reason graphs are so popular is that they’re much easier to design and code.

In any case, Michael Mateas had an interesting way of addressing the problem of plot graphs in Facade – “beats”. In the screenwriting sense, a “beat” is the smallest unit of dramatic action; it encompasses all the actions that lead up to a significant change to some aspect of a character. What Michael Mateas did in Facade was to create a large collection of beats, and linked them to conditions. At various points in the game (which might be due to passage of time, or player input), the computer checks what beats the current game state meets the prerequisites for, and then randomly select from them. The selection procedure for beats and the prerequisites (and a couple of other things) are set up so that the game will end up with a coherent storyline (or at least a coherent experience).

I think I was going to make a point here, but I can’t remember it.

Vaguely related link: Writing flash fiction. It’s kinda like brainstorming for ideas, except there’s actual writing involved later. I should probably try it sometime.

Oh yeah, and I am not a NaNoWriMo winner. I finished with about 10,000 words. Ideally I’ll get more done over the break, or I might get distracted from it and run off and try to do more game-design-y stuff.