Education

Bridging the digital and the physical, past and future, a series of digital images of the first animation ever captured on film was algorithmically quantized and pixelated, and then hand-painted in a stop-motion-capture of the 3D-printed material of tomorrow.

The technique was to first take a mean of the pixels into a 32x24 grid, followed by quantizing the colors into eight shades of gray.

I then designed software which would diff frames to identify which cells needed to be painted, and which cells needed to be left alone.

Made in collaboration with Sylvia Kosowski.

First, scrape gigabytes of TEDTalks. Then, analyze the audio transcripts using the natural language toolkit (NLTK) to count syllables and find rhymes. Finally, prompt the user for some search terms to seed a rap. The program then spits out timestamps from different TEDTalks, and spits out short clips of TEDTalks which contain the matching voice lines.

The remainder of the process is manual, as perfectly timing, editing, and time-stretching the video clips to fit to a beat is not easily automated. But the result is a rap that is as inspirational as the average TEDTalk.

My senior year, I enrolled in Game Engine Programming at Carnegie Mellon. In this course, the class collaboratively built features into the SALD Engine as the semester progressed.

The goals of the game engine were to be to have a small footprint, be easy to use, and most importantly was purpose-designed for the use in game jams like Ludum Dare, where it's important to upload the full source code and assets embedded in the HTML to avoid worrying about additional hosting concerns.

I was the most active contributor, using the engine itself for my own project at the same time, 5 Days Left for my Experimental Animation course.

The core features of the game engine include sprite and tilemap rendering, collision checking, keyboard and mouse input, music and sound effect queueing, storing images and other game files through static data urls, and more.

- SALD Docs
- SALD on GitHub

Python, PyGame, A* Pathfinding, Client-Server Architecture

While CMU was full of natural born programmers and freshmen who had programmed for over a decade, I was not one of them. I came to CMU with a passion to make videogames, but limited experience. The end of 15-112 (Fundamentals of Programming) was capped off with a final project of our choosing that demonstrated our what we've learned.

100+ hours of research and development later, Cold War was born.

Cold War is a real-time-strategy game made with PyGame in Python, making use of advanced algorithms like the A* Pathfinding algorithm for optimal unit movement. The game is client-server based, with the server handling the game state and the client handling the rendering and user input, and takes advantage of a rudamentary culling technique to reduce the number of sprites rendered to the screen.

My project was one of the 14 chosen to present out of a class of 230+ students. Art assets are from Westwood's Red Alert 2.

This video essay was created for my Narrative course, in which we were supposed to create a presentation analyzing some narrative structure or topic of our choice. Being interested in narrative across mediums, and being a huge fan of the stories of the Walking Dead comic and videogame world, I decided to analyze how I feel The Walking Dead was able to successfully translate its original form to both the television and videogame formats.