Singularity Pursuit was developed over the summer of my sophomore year of high school. The game requires one keyboard to play where each player controls one key. Pressing their key allows the player to jump and bounce off walls. By finishing a lap, all the players compete in a minigame that, depending on their performance, will give them buffs during the race.

This was my first completed and released game. The development process was facilitated by a handful of mentors at the Indie Game Collective in Boston. They listened to my pitch and helped me create a game concept that was fun and completeable within the timeframe that I had.

This project was developed in Unity with C#.

Itch.io page: here

During the summer after my junior year of high school, I worked as a consultant programmer at the Concord Consortium, a non-profit company whose goal is to improve teaching and learning through technology. At Concord, I worked on the Seismic Explorer software, which was developed as part of the National Science Foundation funded project, Geological Models for Explorations of the Dynamic Earth (GEODE). Seismic Explorer allows students to explore visualization of up-to-the-minute, worldwide earthquake data from the United States Geological Survey, data about rates of plate motion, and historic data about volcanic eruptions.

My work on Seismic Explorer included redrawing the plate boundaries as a visualization layer, assigning different colors to boundary types (convergent, divergent and transform), and making sure representations remained accurate at different zoom levels. In addition, I added a vector arrows layer to represent rates and directions of plate motion. I revised the software’s menu to include the new features. I also spent some time identifying and fixing bugs.

Seismic Explorer was developed for the web using JavaScript, NodeJS, and React.

Play Write is an ongoing research project at Ithaca College led by Professor Nathan Prestopnik. The goal of the project is to explore the possibility of using a virtual reality environment to facilitate the creative writing process.

I worked on Play Write during the Spring semester of my freshman year. I stayed on as an Ithaca College Summer Scholar to work on the project during the summer. When I joined the project, it was still in the conceptual stage and my task was to begin development of the software. Using the Unity game engine, I created the backend of the entire system as well as many of the features.

Since this is a research project, we experimented with many different features with the idea that not all of them would have an impact on a writer’s creative process. Features could be proposed, designed, and tested to see the impact they had. The features I worked on include:

• Scene Changing: The user can select or change the environment in which they want to work (treehouse, office, or notebook world). They select where they want to work and can walk seamlessly through a virtual hallway to that destination.
• Desktop Integration: Controllers and Vive trackers provide writers with a mixed reality experience in which they can sit and type. Using the controllers and Vive trackers, a user calibrated desk and chair is integrated into the virtual environment. This desk mirrors the computer desktop and has a tracked keyboard for typing, allowing the user to write and use their computer desktop while being surrounded by the virtual environment.
• Idea boards: These boards exist within the virtual workspace. Idea boards can be blank, or contain text and images. They are scalable, moveable boards that can be drawn on using a finger.
• Copy-Paste through Reality: One of the features of the desk is the ability to copy and paste text through realities. For example, the text in a user’s document can be copied and brought into virtual reality on an idea board. This board can also contain images as reference and can be put back into the desk to be pasted back into a document. = Backend: All projects are saved into files. The system remembers and can recall the data stored on idea boards and other objects.

This project was developed in the Unity game engine and uses the HTC Vive, Vive Trackers, and Leap Motion 2.

I took a Machine Learning course at Ithaca College in the spring of 2019. The course covered the math and theory behind machine learning. For my final research project, I decided to research and develop a machine learning model for an autonomous drone hovering in a simulated environment.

For the project, I used Unity Engine’s PhysX for the environment simulation and the Unity ML-agents toolkit for training and running my models. The machine learning algorithm I used was Proximal Policy Optimization, which is a neural-network algorithm provided by the ML-agents toolkit.

Each drone was built of a body and four equidistant thrusters. The thrusters were each controlled by a continuous float value that translated into thrust output.

The model observed the values of the drone’s rotation, velocity, angular velocity, and its distance from the center of its learning space. The model used these values as inputs into the machine learning algorithm. The algorithm then outputs four float values that were each mapped to the drone’s thrusters.

After a lot of experimentation with hyperparameters and several tweaks to the learning environment, I was able to create a self-flying drone that could withstand small impacts from any direction. Early iterations could hover but would crash easy. To create a more robust flight correction system, external collisions were added in the form of projectiles to help the algorithm learn how to self-stabilize from unexpected forces.

JRNL is a tool built for easy daily journaling. When you open JRNL each day and write a journal entry, the entry gets saved and that day’s square is filled in on the calendar. Previous days’ entries can be viewed by clicking on their corresponding squares on the calendar. The initial prototype was built in a week and was inspired by @SimoneGiertz’s and @dittomat’s respective calendars and applications.

The purpose of JRNL is to provide a minimalistic place to keep daily thoughts while also showing which previous days have entries on a calendar. JRNL comes with a markdown editor and supports both rich text and images. It saves all files locally in a markdown format that can be read by other applications.

JRNL is written in JavaScript in conjunction with NodeJS and Electron.

It has been publically released for Windows on itch.io

The itch.io page can be found: here.

I led a team to develop this game in 72 hours for the Ludum Dare 43 game jam. The theme for this jam was Sacrifices Must be Made.

Head Over Hooves: My Heart Bleats for you is a dating-sim game in which God tasks the player with finding a sacrifice to stop the end of the world. The hook is that the sacrifice, who happens to be a talking goat, must fall madly in love with the player! By playing minigames and progressing through the branching narrative, the player increases the goat’s affection for the player, as well as picking up bonus charisma and faith stats. Depending on the player’s performance and choices, they can reach one of five possible endings.

I led the game development team throughout the jam. The five-person team consisted of three writers, a beginner programmer, and myself. I was the lead programmer in addition to leading the team and serving as art design lead. My focus during the jam was designing all of the art for the game, communicating my ideas with the team, keeping tasks on schedule, and helping to program the main gameplay loop. This was my first time leading a team; the other team members had never made a game before.

Head Over Hooves placed in 96th out of 1750 entries. When it comes to individual categories, it placed 8th for humor, 26th for theme, and 90th for mood.

Head Over Hooves was developed with Unity and C#, along with Yarn for writing, and Affinity Photo for art.

The jam page can be found: here.

During the summer of 2019, I worked as a programmer at the Concord Consortium on the GeoCode Explorer, a combination volcanic eruption simulation, programming environment, and data visualization tool, being developed as part of a National Science Foundation funded project. The goal of GeoCode is to integrate coding and the practice of programming with students’ exploration of geologic threats. Students use coding to explore probabilities of hazardous events by examining a range of potential volcanic eruptions and wind field scenarios.

I was brought back on the team during the summer of 2020 for rapid prototyping and iteration of a new feature for visualizing the crustal strain of the tectonic plates using USGS GPS data.

As part of an agile team, I was responsible for implementing requested features, including adding data visualization components and overhauling map interaction and display methods. I fixed bugs, provided builds for user testing, participated in stand up meetings, and was assigned stories to complete.

I also participated in design meetings where I acted as a computer science domain expert. I worked with the educational team to design coding challenges for the curriculum.

The application was developed primarily with NodeJS and React and was written in TypeScript.

My fork of the Github repository can be found: here.