Designer and writer for three week long games of Humans vz. Zombies, a moderated game of team-based objective driven tag. In addition, I also worked on creating and theming two single-day games which featured players from the broader region.

Spring 2018 Week-long

Sherlock vs Moridarty

Players: 170

Theme: Sherlock-themed investigation of London. Scotland Yard vs. Moridarty’s Gang

Co-designer: Jon Foley

Introduced time-changing objectives for the first time in missions to allow controllable pace-changing by admins. This allowed us to better hide information and cause a shift in the middle of specific missions so players didn’t see everything at first read. This also enabled more complex missions because less information needed to get conveyed to players at the start.

Implemented new types of set-piece style missions and zombie focused objectives and items. This led to more intentional “wow” moment design and helped give zombies more things to do than sit around and wait for humans.

Fall 2018 Week-long

The Dunwater Horror

Players: 560

Theme: A Lovecraftian cult attempts to take the town of Dunwater. Investigators vs. Cultists.

Co-designer: Sam Sorenson

Tried out new types of moderator controlled zombies and more intentional story foreshadowing of mechanics, and worked towards a continuity of locations across the week. Traditionally, locations would change in attempts to use more of the campus. Sam and I instead looked at how we can intentionally reuse components in the fiction to justify returning to locations. An example is arresting and jailing cultists on night one for a capture mission, and having a zombie escort mission later to rescue people from the jail.

Implemented a coded cipher to add an avenue to play even when people couldn’t participate in missions.

Spring 2019 Week-long

Corporate Zombies

Players: 158

Theme: Employees attempt to claim their severance packages or secure their employment against a new group of brainless hires appear. Employees vs New Zombie Hires

Co-designer: Sam Sorenson

Implemented new player controlled zombies after learning from invitational games. Reduced the emphasis on ciphers to turn it more into an alternative for player engagement and bonuses, and less of a core part for the general player base. Carried forward the emphasis on continuity in location usage from Fall 2018.

Added a new approach to prop usage to make missions feel less repetitive to the existing player base, and different ways of making players aware of changes. An example would be using paper shredders at objectives for an audio cue of activity.

In addition to week-long design, I worked on designing day-long invitationals where we brought in players from other schools to play in a condensed game. These games had a set theme, but were more improvisational in nature as they depended on when players needed to head back, player count on the day, and player reactions to prior missions. These were often used as ways to test new concepts and have a sillier approach as refreshers between week-longs. Finally, I helped convey mission information to moderators, managed the game during active points of play on campus, managed side-missions during the day, and collected player feedback.