Narrative Designer. Game Developer. Lecturer. Player Experience Consultant.
I'm an award-winning narrative-focused game developer who's spoken at GDC, worked with Take This, and made some Games for Impact.
I started out in Multimedia (Computer Science, Web Development, Graphic Design, oh my!), fell in love with teaching, and found my (he)art in Game Development. Along the way I’ve mentored people, built games degrees, and worked with indies to make games that help people learn, feel, and grow.
Currently, I’m a Senior Lecturer teaching at the University of Portsmouth. I'm also the founder of Two Left, a studio and consultancy focused on values-conscious design and player wellbeing. I make games about the things that matter to people, and in doing so, hopefully make the world a better place.
Born from my PhD and the personal weight of the COVID years, What We Take With Us is a reflective wellbeing game about the things we carry — and the things we’re ready to let go of. I designed it as a sprawling, multi-format experience: part webgame, part ARG, part escape-room-that-isn’t, and part workshop series. Across all formats, it asks players to slow down, reflect, and reconnect with what matters to them - the things they value. I wrote the narrative, built the website, and directed all the cross-media content including art, VO and video content. It’s been talked about at GDC, DiGRA, CHI Play, and ICIDS, won me TIGA's 2023 Outstanding Postgraduate of the Year award, and even got featured on Safe in our World. But most importantly, it’s helped players (and me) process emotions, memories, and life's many changes one task at a time.
A multi-year Alternate Reality Game that taught information literacy through exploration, collaboration, and puzzle-solving. I designed puzzles and a fragmented narrative delivered through web, print, and live campus events. It guided players through ISBN hunts, cipher codebreaking, Harvard referencing, and the old-faithful HTML source inspection. Later reimagined as We Are Nomads, a mobile spin-off funded by the Goethe-Institut, built in partnership with Celestial Games, and showcased at IFLA 2015.
Tyler
Gameplay Programmer, Level Designer, & Writer
A 2D puzzle game about heartbreak, a never-ending dungeon, and the voice in your head that just won’t shut up. Built in XNA/Monogame and C# (targeting XBLA), it expanded on classic tile puzzles and turned them into a full-scale progression of escalating mechanics: portals, timers, and, of course, sliding ice puzzles. I even convinced Kevan Brighting — yes, the voice of The Stanley Parable — to record our entire sarcastic script. The result is weird, meta, and still pretty playable over a decade later.
A podcast about the people who make games and the people who make games matter. It's part of the Multiplay Network (a UK-based academic group for games researchers), and over the seasons it’s grown into a space for honest, curious conversations with developers, critics, educators, and creators working around games.
Recent guests include Nina Freeman (Cibele), Matt Bell (Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG), and a mix of voices from across industry and academia. If you care about storytelling, game design and research, the joy of play, or the future of the games industry, I’d love to have you listen. And if you’ve got something to share, reach out via email.
Here are a bunch of ideas I’ve explored in talks, papers, and consultancy work. Each has shaped my approach to game design, development, storytelling, and creating memorable player experiences.
GDC 2025 – Beyond Empathy
"Did you know I went to GDC?" will now forever be an in-joke between my colleagues and I. But I did. And it was awesome!
Presented at the TIGG Developer Summit, my talk explores how empathy is but one in a sea of different values we can be basing our games around, how those values manifest, and how we can intentionally design for them.
A talk from EGC 2024 about the emotional labour of making personal games from personal pain, the difficulties of getting people to participate, and a strong sense of imposter syndrome that I experienced while making What We Take With Us. In it, I discuss various ways how to protect yourself when you're too close to your work.
A talk from the Oxford Inclusive Games conference reflecting more on What We Take With Us and how to make personal game development more sustainable. Focus on your game's values in your marketing, being prepared for things to go wrong, collaborate with others, and most importantly, take care of yourselves!
With Lincoln Geraghty, Peter Howell, and Em Kershaw, I explored the world of video games at the end of 2024. We chatted Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, the buzz around the Game Awards nominees, PlayStation's impact on the industry, the growing role of AI in game development, and the surprising ways games can benefit our wellbeing.
Theory meets practice. These microtalks and publications explore how games embed values, teach players, and foster emotional engagement across various formats.
Lessons for larp from What We Take With Us
In further deconstruction of the “empathy game” mythos, what if we stopped designing for empathy and started designing for specific values instead? WWTWU taught me a few hard truths: emotional proximity to your work doesn’t guarantee connection with others, not everyone wants to play with grief, but most importantly, designer burnout is real.
So obviously, I ignored all that and kept iterating and until made it into a larp. What We Leave Behind is that game — a live experience where characters at a crossroads explore what they're walking away, or running, from.
Did you know that games carry values? In the stories they tell, the systems they build, and the worlds they show. I used Peter Howell's game space model to explore how values show up across five stages of a game's life: design, development, publication, interaction, and reporting.
I dig into how values show up in narrative, mechanics, and aesthetic choices; how creators’ and collaborators' values shape development choices, what publishers signal with what they allow or suppress, how players engage and subvert values in play, and what gets remembered or discussed afterwards. From Train to Depression Quest, I map how meaning travels throughout a game and why that matters.
This piece was born from one core frustration: people talk about “empathy in games” like it’s a single thing. It’s not. In this article, I lay out a clearer spectrum — from pity to compassion — and show how different games provoke different emotional reactions, on purpose or by accident. Using examples like The Beginner’s Guide, Firewatch, That Dragon, Cancer and Kind Words, I unpack how games can make players feel for, with, or because of someone — and why that distinction matters.
If you’re designing emotional systems, testing player impact, or just trying to do justice to the stories you’re telling, this spectrum gives you a way to think about empathy as more than a buzzword.
This paper shares how Nomad worked, and sometimes didn't. I wanted to teach information literacy skills to university students, and so they followed the disappearing Nomad (basically The Doctor from Doctor Who) and Ana Kirlitz (the very same) across the library shelves and the world wide web. They used ISBNs to track books and cracked ciphers stashed inside them, and decoded clues with Google Maps and group chats.
But it wasn’t perfect: some puzzles were too complex, others too boring, and we nearly broke the game by a missing a deadline. We learned keep tasks varied, design for small groups but hope for giant crowds, and never assume players read all your lore.
Articles and essays written for a wider audience where I explore what games mean to people — from values, to cosy games, and of course a little Last of Us.
How GamerGate led the games industry to embrace more diverse and caring values
Once a flashpoint for harassment and backlash (though, some would argue, we're still there), the aftermath of GamerGate gave rise to a quiet revolution: more developers and players who wanted to see games not only as escapism, but as spaces for care and connection, and personal meaning. The subsequent rise in more diverse creators and communities reshaped the games we saw on our shelves. More walking sims. More cosy games. More values.
Now games can show us what happens when games stop encouraging us to escape reality, and start helping us live through it, instead.
I created a ‘cosy game’ – and learned how they can change players’ lives
Cosy games exploded during the pandemic, offering comfort, connection, and calm in a time of uncertainty. I reflect on how that moment reshaped both the games we play and the ways we make them. I share lessons from building my own cosy game, and offer advice for devs trying to balance personal storytelling with sustainable practice.
It’s a piece about burnout, beauty, and why small, heartfelt games still matter, even when they only reach a few players. Especially then.
How The Sims accidentally invented the cosy game genre
From deleting pool ladders to designing our dream kitchens, The Sims changed how an entire generation thought about play. In this retrospective, I explore how its blend of chaos, creativity, and character-driven storytelling paved the way for today’s cosy game boom.
From the game's emergent narratives to its gender diversity and growing machinima fan culture, I celebrate how The Sims taught us that games don’t need winners — just weird little guys who pee themselves when you forget to build a bathroom.
HBO's The Last of Us elevates the video game’s themes of love and family
Adaptations often miss what makes games special — but HBO’s adaptation both effectively translates gameplay into film and recentres the emotional core from “dadification” to more nuanced portrayals of love, family, and connection.
Pete and I traced how the series builds on the original’s values by linking Joel and Ellie’s connection to a wider constellation of found families in resistance movements and even the Cordyceps itself. The Last of Us remains terrifying, messy, but ultimately hopeful exploration of love in a world falling apart.
The Last of Us Season Two forgets what made its video game unforgettable
Season One captured lightning in a bottle by reproducing the game’s tension and player complicity. Season Two starts in the much the same vein — bottles, bloaters, and stealth — but somewhere along the way, the controller is put down. This piece explores how the HBO series shifts from interactive echo to prestige drama, and what gets lost in translation.
Drawing on adaptation theory, we explore the reworking of Ellie’s arc, the show's reframing of the game's commentary on violence and agency, and the structural gamble of a story told in two halves across multiple years. When the point of this series was its play, what remains when we're only allowed to watch?
I was honoured to serve as a judge for the inaugural Take This Accelerate Fellowship, a six-month program by Take This with support from Riot Games. The fellowship nurtures early-career developers, researchers, and advocates working at the intersection of games, mental health, DEI, and player safety.
Fellows created incredibly impactful work, from roleplaying therapy tools and grief game libraries to academic policy research and character design rooted in lived experience. The quality and thoughtfulness on display inspired the hell out of me!
If you’re building games with care, this is where to look. I can’t wait to see what comes from future cohorts — and hope to keep contributing to work like this.
A multi-format, values-conscious game about emotional wellbeing: what we carry, what we let go of, and how we find meaning in the middle.
What We Take With Us started with me trying to figure out what an "empathy escape room" would look like. That bloomed into a broader understanding of values, and then the COVID-19 pandemic happened. In the haze, I needed something to help me feel better, so the game changed into something more personal: tasks to regulate myself, a narrative space to explore my own values and memories, and later on a momument to the cost of developing these kinds of personal games.
🌀 Formats
Webgame — A sequence of 11 creative wellbeing tasks, ranging from journaling to visual expression to music curation. Designed to be soft, repeatable, and location-agnostic (mirroring the nature of remote-work) during the pandemic. You can play it here.
ARG on Discord/YouTube
A puzzle-light, narrative-focused ARG that tells the story of Ana Kirlitz, delivered audio, video, and written content from Ana. It ran from February to June 2023 and attracted around 40 players.
Ana’s story unfolded across voice notes, video diaries, and Discord messages.
You can still join the Discord community
here and watch Ana’s
YouTube videos.
Room-based Installation
A narrative-rich immersive space styled as Ana’s abandoned office, playing on the "empathy escape room" concept. But players were invited to linger, not escape; to notice, not solve. Running during April and May 2023 in Portsmouth, UK, 7 people engaged with the physical space.
Ana's abandoned office. A soft, still installation space built to be felt, not solved.
Facilitated Workshops
Stripped of Ana’s fiction, the workshops focused on the tasks themselves. I continue to run these with groups across 5 workshops (and counting) — online, in universities, and at wellbeing events like MindRise 2025 and the University of Portsmouth's Feel Good Week.
A hands-on version of WWTWU at MindRise 2025.
✍️ Development Notes
I built most of WWTWU solo — design, programming, narrative, web dev, VO and art direction, video editing, and collaborating with Emma, the actor who played Ana. So I was doing a lot, and I was writing a lot of myself into the game. That process was emotionally heavy. Many of the tasks came straight from things I was struggling with at the time: unclear work/life boundaries, cluttered space, creative block, transitions. That “design bleed” made the work honest, but it made me fragile.
And then not everything landed. And that sucked. The Discord onboarding was rough — we didn't tell people the ARG was a game outright - to them, Anas was a real human with real problems. That framing confused some people. The room was beautiful, but didn't get as much use as I'd hoped. I underestimated how hard it would be to build a community around any game as one person, let alone something this emotionally open. But when it did work — when players sent voice notes, when we did our gentle rituals together — you could feel that it mattered to the people who did play.
💡 Reflections
Personal games will ask more of you than you expect. Build with care — your game won't ship if no one is there to finish it.
Not everyone will call it a “game,” and that’s okay. One player said it felt more like “a toolkit”, but they meant it as a compliment.
Community needs tending. Even 40 players is a lot if you’re doing it all alone. Next time, I’ll build a team.
Unexpected impact counts. Emma started a new career inspired by Ana's story. And so many players told me that WWTWU changed the way they thought about games. And that's what I take with me.
