I have been freelancing for the last couple of weeks building a blog for at a great interactive agency called Kapitall in SoHo.

About Page

Blog Page

They are working on a really great product that provides a game-like visual UI for buying and selling stocks. Their UI was designed by Cordell Ratzlaff, the man behind Mac OSX. It is a great place to be working. Their site is here. I have also been helping develop wireframes for some new features they are working on.

I am designing and producing an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) called “4th Wall” for my Thesis project. My thesis concept is to introduce casual players to the ARG experience. I am aiming for teen to young adult people who have either never heard of an ARG or are relatively new to the idea. I have had tremendous help from Eric Chung – a first year MFA student in the Design and Technology Department at Parsons.

I cannot put too much detail about it on the web as one of the main tactics of the game is to conduct web-based research and I do not want to risk players finding information that could spoil the game. However, I can discuss the narrative of the game and show some of the assets I have designed for it.

The Narrative
The story of the game is about a reporter working for the Daily Informant news site named Paige Stein. Paige has been working on a story that she insists will be groundbreaking when it is published. However, she goes missing and her apartment is burned to the ground before that can happen. Her editor, Sam King has found a piece of evidence that may unlock the secret of her story and disappearance in the wreckage of her apartment. He enlists the players to help him fill in the blanks of the story.

Assets
The assets I have created are for ficticious companies and organizations that help create the alternate reality in which the game lives.

Tyger Pharmaceuticals – A large pharmaceutical company

The Daily Informant – an online news source

TheyKnowWeKnow – a paranoid conspiracy theory blog

Metatonic Society – a zealous self-help organization

Other assets that are still in development are several AS3-based games and puzzles that players need to solve in order to complete the game and a couple of multimedia elements that will pop up along the way. I am hoping to launch an Alpha Test by early next month.

I am working Victoria Vesna to help establish a framework for collaborative class between Parsons and UCLA. I helped build a system using WordPressMU that allows for multiple users to create accounts and add content having to do with the three class between the two universities. I collaborated with Christo Allegra and Bruce Drummond to design and build the site.

This is a simple application I built in AS3 for my Espionage game. The Application uses allows users to write out location clues using 4 parameters.
Click here for .swf file.

The Application then uses Twitter to generate obscured clues and then posts them to a blog that players use to communicate.