WRITING
From long, ponderous prose set in far away fantasy lands to compelling literary reportage to sardonic media reviews to technical writing to straight journalism, I continue to write for purpose and pleasure. Here are a few examples.
Hello, World!
Starting from zero, the first order of business was a major public relations effort to expose the concept of our project to the world through a series of videos, testimonials, panels, conferences, educational opportunities, and convention appearances. While refining our prototype, we spent 18 months building a strong, foundational relationship with the retro gaming community and evaluating feedback.
This was our project's launch video, which subsequently helped drive a quarter million dollar crowdfunding effort.
Articulating a Complex Design
Articulating a vision for a software through a design document is difficult enough, but it's made infinitely more complex when it needs to completely invent new processes while juggling the vision across multiple programming languages.
Through hundreds of collective pages of technical specs, code snippets, previsualization, mock-ups, and explainers, our team of creatives all contributed to the living and evolving document, which continues to be appended with every new iteration.
Personally, I managed the team, ideated export needs, and wrote all of the code and technical documentation for the ASM side of the software.
Setting the Benchmarks
One of the significant challenges to the projects was being in uncharted territory. Because of the obscene memory limitations of the ultimate deliverable, there was a lot of trial and error, and often times one member of the team would be in an unavoidable holding pattern waiting for the other to finish a task. We simply had no realistic understanding of how long certain tasks would take to fully implement. So instead of working with a regiment of due dates, I established a priority hierarchy to ensure that prerequisite tasks were front loaded.
The team used Basecamp as a project repository, mostly used Trello for organization, which often linked to weeklies on Google Drive that contained marked up portions of the design document.
Building a Community
Having a reliable stream of customers is great. Seeing our creation being utilized to bring amazing projects into existence is very validating. But the real key to success is building a loyal and enthusiastic community. Constant interaction and recognition of members of our community has turned passive, casual consumers into passionate brand ambassadors.
The Byte-Off awards is a tentpole example of a piece of advertainment, where we both reward current users and entice new ones.
Appeal to Global Retailers
Knowing that GameStop, the largest video game retailer in the world, was undergoing a massive public relations and rebranding campaign, we deeply researched their new strategy and aimed our collaboration pitch specifically towards their articulated goals.
The new vision for the store included four major pillars of engagement: immersion, achievement, creativity, and community. Click on the eye to see how we crafted our pitch deck to appeal to those initiatives.