Game Designer in Residence
DePaul University, 2016 - 2025

As a term faculty member, I helped build one of the most renowned game development programs in the midwest, creating and revamping courses and interviewing and hiring new faculty members. I served as one of several faculty advisors to the entire Game Development student body, planned events and booked speakers, and advised numerous independent studies and thesis projects.

Classes taught: Games Literacy, Advanced Game Design, History and Design of Role-Playing Games, Playgramming, Writing for Games, Game Dev 1, Game Dev Capstone.

Example course materials and lesson plans:

Image: Bitsy screenshot of locked room murder mystery characters in the foyer of a mansion. Butler: "The crime scene is as we discovered it."

From 2020 to 2025 I taught a class in narrative design using Bitsy, a simple game-making tool by adam le doux. The objective of the class was to learn how to tell interactive stories with a simple set of tools: spatial movement, simple interactions, concise dialogue, pixel art, color design, and screen composition. Bitsy is both (A) relatively approachable for non-programmers, and (B) actively resistant to systems-based design, making it perfect.

I created these Itsy Bitsy Exercises for my narrative design class. They also informed an online course on writing interactive fiction that I developed for Accent Accent in 2025.

Image: Single-page map of Europe for playing a Diplomacy scenario, with descriptions of the factions and rules references.

Between 2020 and 2025 I ran a class on the History and Design of Tabletop RPGs. A challenge I faced was presenting historically-important tabletop games in a meaningful (i.e. playable) context in an hour-and-a-half class. Most of the games I wanted to play and discuss have long session times, even when run as one-shots.

In my quest to bring these titanic games into my classroom, I created bite-sized versions of these games that could be run in 50 minutes, provide a meaningful amount of the game's dynamics and texture, and still leave room for discussion.

The games include Diplomacy, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Apocalypse World, We Are But Worms, and, to bridge the histories of tabletop and digital role-playing, Wizardry.

Image: Screenshot of Super Mario Bros. with arrows drawn over it.

Level Design Lessons collects a series of essays first published on my blog in 2009, breaking down and annotating level design patterns in 2D platform games.

Some of the concepts I articulated in this essay would become the basis of my 2014 textbook, A Game Design Vocabulary.