RUIN is a short text adventure that tells a grand tale.

I created RUIN for an assignment in my Intro to Game Development class at USC. The assignment was to follow the Text101 tutorial in the Udemy C# Unity Game Development course, then modify/expand the end result. I decided to write my own original story and had a ton of fun while doing so, exploring different methods of branching the narrative and looping it back around.

Download | Play in Browser (twine ver)

The following samples were written for my most recent D&D campaign, entitled The Island of Death's Cry. The campaign sends players to a cursed island in search of a wealthy lord's missing daughter who ran away from home over 200 years ago.

Here's a riddle I wrote, spoken by a ghostly boatman offering to ferry my players across a spooky lake:

Gold jewelry and diamonds are worth no more

Than worn copper and pieces of coal

Unless fate would grant, through one's heartache

A sentimental care, easy to break

The value of a soul, pays the price in full

If you wish to cross, you must suffer a loss.

I also wrote two curses, legends told on the island about ghostly omens of death, and several dream sequences for the players.

Curses | Dream Sequences

The Legend of Zonah is a story akin to a children's tale: the story of a hero searching for companionship, who ultimately loses the friends he's made to corruption and greed.

The Legend of Zonah was written as a story for my D&D campaign, The Empire's Folly,  which ran from September 2020 to April 2021 with a total of 30 sessions played and over 100 hours of D&D madness. A prop for a player character's personal arc, I had a lot of fun writing out the story from the basic plot outline my player gave me.

Sample

Full Text

Hualing and Watson twists and gender bends three classic Sherlock Holmes tales into a 1970s adventure in Los Angeles starring a Chinese, lesbian Sherlock (renamed Hualing), and an African American Watson.

I helped write the script as part of a 10-person writers' room led by Professor John Watson, for the Advanced Genre Writing graduate class at USC. Over the course of a semester, we brainstormed, outlined, and drafted the entire ~90-page screenplay. This process helped me learn to write in collaboration and align style and character when writing scattered scenes across a long work.

Hualing and Watson will go into production as part of a graduate film production class in Spring 2023, and is expected to have a limited release in theatres when completed as part of the School of Cinematic Arts USC Originals initiative!

Sample

Sex Education is a comedy-drama series on Netflix following the lives of students attending secondary school as they contend with personal issues, often related to sexual intimacy.

I wrote several spec scenes for the series as assignments for a screenwriting class at USC. Writing for the series helped me learn how to emulate the tone and style of an established IP, as well as capture the voices of its characters.

Goat - New School