Arc

If I could compress my lifelong ambition down to a single idea it would be to tell stories through video games. During the last years of college,I actually got an opportunity to complete a small XNA game with two programmers from Rice University (one of them was my brother, nepotism?).I was taken on board as an artist because they wanted to have art content slightly more impressive than MS Paint scribbles (ah, programmer art).

Naturally, if you give a mouse a cookie he'll want a glass of milk, so I ended up designing the game concept, writing the "endings" (it was an abstract shooter so not much was required in the form of writing), designing the 3D and 2D art, composing the music loops (inspired by this song from Infected Mushroom), and creating the sound effects.

The game was called Arc.

This is a screenshot from the level "Irrational".

The basic idea is that you pick a colored ship and fly through a trippy auto-scrolling level whilst trying to destroy as many blocks as possible (the name comes from arc welder). There are a few novelties and nuances to this process. First, the laser cutter on your ship cuts faster through thinner chunks of blocks and secondly, various power ups can help you succeed.

In this shot, the second player is using the score laser to attack the first player.

Arc also contained a co-op and versus multiplayer mode. The versus mode gave each player half the screen where the goal was to out score the opponent. In this mode, extra power ups were available to harass your opponent including one that destroys everything on there half of the screen (thus robbing them of potential points). Vengeance was always available in the score laser, though. The score laser was a secondary weapon in versus mode that attacks the other players score directly. In this way, versus matches can either be played by trying to increase your own score or by decreasing your opponent's score to win.

This is a screenshot from the versus mode.

I will hopefully have some fancy trippy videos of gameplay available soon. But for now, enjoy these screenshots.