Ellie Prince – The Mechanics of Magic

P2: “The Sixth Face” (Team Bathyergus)

August 14, 2026

Team Bathyergus: Xingyi, Ellie, Claire, Dana, Hazel Artist’s Statement The Sixth Face is a single-player puzzle videogame for the Playdate system centering on Vincent…

Final Class Reflection

August 13, 2026

Before CS247G, the games I played most were Solitaire, Hearts, Sudoku variants, and the Rasputin level of Just Dance on Wii–I didn’t consider myself…

Extra Credit: Sketchnote: Cursed Problems

August 9, 2026

Critical Play: Mysteries & Escape Rooms

August 6, 2026

A detective receives a letter from his father and arrives to find the town of Redcliff emptied, every door and drawer locked with difficult…

Sketchnote: Onboarding in PvZ

August 2, 2026

Critical Play: Puzzles

July 30, 2026

Portal 2 (Valve, 2011), a first-person puzzle-platformer available on PC/Mac/PS3/Xbox360 (played on PC) targeting puzzle-game enthusiasts, makes story far more than scaffolding around puzzles….

Sketchnote: Puzzles in Games, Puzzles as Games

July 28, 2026

Critical Play: Worldbuilding

July 22, 2026

Pokémon Pearl, a creature-collecting RPG by Game Freak/Nintendo (2007) available on Nintendo DS (played on online emulator), targets children and RPG players of all…

Extra-Credit Sketchnote: Designer’s Notebook: Role of Architecture in Videogames

July 21, 2026

Checkpoint 1: Concept Doc (Team Bathyergus)

July 20, 2026

Team Bathyergus (Xingyi, Ellie, Claire, Dana, Hazel) Synopsis The game is a dive into the mind, each level a deeper layer revealing clues and…

Individual Concept Doc – Ellie Prince (Team Bathyergus)

July 19, 2026

Moodboard Spotify Playlist 3 Directions from Ideation Narrative series of puzzles based on recognizable famous artworks. This direction would involve a series of levels…

Sketchnote: Loops & Arcs

July 19, 2026

Example Game: Slither.io. I can get embarrassingly sidetracked playing Slither.io because it’s addictively simple and challenging, but it’s also interestingly almost pure loop architecture….

Checkpoint 0: Team Norms (Team Bathyergus)

July 17, 2026

Team Bathyergus’ Norms: Complete assigned tasks on time (don’t make the team wait for/remind you). Show up to all the meetings and be ready…

Critical Play: Walking Simulators

July 16, 2026

Journey, thatgamecompany’s 2012 masterpiece directed by Jenova Chen (published by Sony), is the strongest rebuttal I’ve played to the “walking simulator” label–a genre defined,…

Mindmap: Narrative Architecture

July 13, 2026

P1: “Hexster” (Team Bilby)

July 10, 2026

Team Bilby: Xingyi, Ellie, Zicheng, Dana, Hazel Hexster: Great Minds Dig Alike Artist’s Statement Hexster is a team-based route-building game that explores how people collaborate…

Critical Play: Competitive Analysis

July 7, 2026

Pathlock (Brian Hamilton, Logic Puzzles Online, c. 2026) is a browser-based, zero-sum, perfect-information race game across a gridded board. As a digital implementation of…

Game Design Patterns for Building Friendships

July 4, 2026

Critical Play: Bluffing, Judging and Getting Vulnerable…

July 2, 2026

Developed by the American game studio Innersloth, Among Us is a 2018 online multiplayer social deduction and bluffing game. Targeting primarily casual gamers, teens,…

Sketchnote: What Games Are and Aren’t

June 30, 2026

Untitled Notebook