twine prototypes

descent, feeding, chased, and turning are some short pieces of interactive fiction made with Twine 2. feeding and turning follow a newborn vampire through the turning process and as they fight to resist the urge to feed on a human. chased plays with the gothic tropes of being hunted, sexual power dynamics, and the gray area between terror and pleasure. descent looks at religious trauma, queer desire, and haunting. These games are explorations of the queer gothic mode that were the playable components of my MFA thesis, blood play. Specifically, with feeding and turning, I explored how to use the formal elements of hypertext-based games to elicit the feelings I am interested in evoking with my final visual novel: the dread of damnation, self-loathing and self-flagellation for your own monstrous nature, and the horror of realizing that there is no God. chased plays with the affordances of Twine as an engine and elicits an emotional reaction that is decidedly gothic. descent is more of an exploration of stitching together fragments of temporally disconnected narratives.

posters

blood play was shown at the unforgetting exhibition at UC Santa Cruz from 22 April 2022 to 30 April 2022. Since the games were designed to be played on a mobile device, I chose to design posters for the games and place QR codes that linked to each individual game on the walls next to their respective posters.

ink prototype

As part of my prototyping work, I’ve looked at multiple formats for the interactive narrative portion of my thesis project. Twine is the program I’m most familiar with, but I wanted to branch out (and potentially work with storylets), so I dipped into Ink. interview is a short Ink retelling of the beginning of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.

bitr

bitr (previously bloodryv) is part of the concepting process for my Digital Arts and New Media MFA thesis project. This is a prototype of a mix between a period tracker, an instant message service, a food (read: blood) delivery interface, a familiar locator, and a daylight reminder. Basically, it’s everything the modern vampire might want on their smartphone.

This project started out as a joke tool I put up on my personal UCSC site. It was unfinished and on its third iteration (first as an iPhone app written in Swift, then as a mobile game made in Unity, and finally as a website), so I took a break from programming and decided to hash out some of the visual design.

In the future, this app will likely be fully functional and exist as a sub-screen within a larger narrative game (probably in the format of a visual novel, though there is a conversation I am having about making the narrative of the game take place entirely in this fictional app and its human companion app). When I figure out more of the details for scope I plan on hiring a few team members to help me produce assets for the game, but for now this is a solo project. To the left are some pictures from the most recent design iteration (which are slightly newer than the images featured in my mfa blog post about this progress.

In addition to designing screens for the app, I’ve also put together some fake ads for biter. These fake ads were inspired by campaigns such as got milk?, Uber Eats ads, and online dating site ads (like Bumble and Hinge). In-universe, bloodryv has been at the center of controversies surrounding its algorithms, coded racial and class bias, data harvesting, and labor violations. I will be working on making some fake op-eds next.