Erin Ford

A Jack of All Trades

I'm a gameplay designer and developer from Columbus, OH specializing in C# and Unity engine.
In my free time, I enjoy playing the bass, building Magic: The Gathering decks, and expanding my knowledge on all things science and technology.

Witch Game was a narrative based potion brewing game that I developed with a team of 5 other people in Unity. I was mostly in charge of the main puzzle gameplay design, creating the various mechanics that the player would use to craft different potions. We had a lot of issues with this project, including poor team cohesiveness and several main game architecture restructurings in the middle of development The lack of playtesting/others' overconfidence in ideas leading to committing to poor design decisions for far too long. However, it was a good learning experience about project management and learning to speak up for my own design sensibilities.

Arkhe is an art installation collective run by RIT faculty member, Travis Stodter. We were focusing primarily on using AR and IoT devices to create an interactive exhibit made to look like an unassuming living room, with various objects in the room being interactive. I took place in a wide variety of side projects with Arkhe, including creating a coffee cup that changed parameters on a visual synthesizer using an arduino and hall effect sensors, sensing how many people's feet are touching a rug using OpenCV, connecting various IoT devices to a Redis instance, and updating our website to be powered by React.

This was orignally supposed to be a literal wave table which had an LED lightshow submerged underwater and a small servo motor creating the waves, with the LEDs on the bottom creating a cool lighting effect. We downscaled to just controlling a series of wave patterns using two light sensors to adjust where the waves originated and decayed from. It sometimes had issues getting stuck producing waves on one side or the other, but overall I liked the lighting effect and was proud of my overall ability to solder the array together and get it functionally displaying things with a straightforward set of helper functions. I worked on this in a team of 2 other people, solely using arduino.

Wacky Wizards was a party card game prototype that I developed with a team of 3 other students. It was a party card game that emphasized silly gags, unpredictable but still fun cards, and the layering of interesting card interactions, creating a card interaction system akin to a simplified Magic: The Gathering. I was really proud of my design work on this, though I wish I could have gotten more playtesting.

Budget Commander Search was a class project that focused on creating a tailored commander search for the Scryfall API. Most challenges came with Scryfall not exactly having the best documentation of use cases of their API, but the community work on further documentation and answering questions helped supplement that a great deal.

This project was a group effort as a part of IGME-106 to make a game in C# using MonoGame. I mostly created the level editor and loading tools for this game, while the whole team collaborated on gameplay. Our vision was to create a movement based shoot-em-up that had item movement mechanics and utility inspired by games like Team Fortress 2. Unfortunately, we were using Windows Forms to develop the level editor which made development progress very frustrating. However, I overcame that with just determination and patience, and was able to create a relatively comprehensive editor.