Worldbuilding
Whether they are fantastical places or alternate histories, I love creating worlds. Over the years, I have cultivated the skills needed to make realistic and evocative stories in a wide variety of worlds and settings.
Shaping a narrative doesn’t just come in words. The collaborative visual and design aspects of making a story are essential to making it truly immersive. Understanding this relationship is paramount to narrative design and creative writing of any nature.
Worlds aren’t just made, they are Born
My cousins and I began creating the fantastical world of Bensilot as we played make-believe on the family farm in Michigan when we were children.
This world has not only inspired thousands of pages of my writing and several game prototypes but also a host of art made by my cousin Emily.
I have made video games, written novels, and played thousands of hours of Dungeons and Dragons in this world of Myria. Bensilot, the world of our childhood, is but a single nation in a vast fantasy setting with hundreds of locations, cultures, and characters populating its intriguing and fantastical landscapes.
Role Playing Games
For years, I’ve been running Dungeons and Dragons, and other ttRPGs, campaigns in this fantasy setting of Myria, spending thousands of hours gaming with my friends and creating content, as well as inspiring the creativity of artists and hobbyists to make vivid character art and intricate terrain tiles, as shown here.
This play has always served as an inspiration for me, as game mechanics and cooperative storytelling drive me to make more maps, develop new cultures, and explore storylines that I never would have come up with on my own.
This kind of collaborative work is exactly the kind of thing that sent me towards narrative design for video games, allowing me to not only express my own ideas for worldbuilding and adventures but those created by others as well.
Design
For 10 years, I ran my own business selling antiques where I was able to combine interior design and narratives into a coherent space. The green and orange psychedelic ashtray paired with a statue of Alexander the Great on a blonde wood coffee table surrounded by a pair of green and blue chairs and a flowered sofa all together speak volumes to my tastes in design and interiors. As well as the photo of my own curio cabinet from 2016 here.
They tell my story to anyone walking into my booth or my home without a word spoken and drove customers to find themselves within that space as well. That is the kind of design philosophy that I transfer into my video game narrative design and fiction writing continually.
My curio cabinet tells it all:
