Category: Portfolio

Firemaker (2014)

The sun had set on summer, but the sky was still aglow. Flames spilled from the dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore in white and green and gold; and the smoke stole the sparks from the Arno River, and flung them all across Florence.

Firemaker is a short story I wrote for Science Chronicles, a short story competition where the theme is “science and technology.”

Unfortunately, my story was rejected, as the science and technology of Renaissance Italy was not what the judges had in mind.

Link to Google Docs

Prospecting (2014)

A poem written for SingPoWriMo 2014:

Begin the procedure.
Hammers and calipers split land and sea,
Each raw gash torn open by callow claw
For blood. The needles pound,
Piston, drink ancient gallons
From veins unseen: in the black,
The humours echo dead vitae still.
Stainless arms jerk and couple,
Each motor screeching mating cries:
The blood that burns,
Transfused to voracious beasts
That whirr and turn.
Listen to the city’s heartbeat, where
The aorta is tar and pitch:
The dinosaurs’ screams still last.
To put today on life support
We burn the past.

Solphos (2012-)

Solphos is a fantasy setting inspired by cyberpunk, art deco, and classical European alchemy. It is the setting of my game The Weight of a Soul.

I created Solphos in 2012 as a fan fiction setting for the Magic: the Gathering card game. In Magic, each card set is tied to a particular fantasy setting. In keeping with this tradition, when I designed my homebrew card sets Solphos and Fool’s Gold, I created a fantasy setting for those cards to inhabit.

Solphos
Fool’s Gold

Later I wrote an extensive setting guide, which became the basis of several other sketches and writing projects, including The Weight of a Soul itself. I’ve listed these other works in the foreword of the setting guide.

A Planeswalker’s Guide to Solphos

Harmony (2011)

This educational board game about China-Japan relations was created for a Social Studies school project.

The basic idea was that you had three pieces — a handshake representing diplomacy, a cannon representing military power, and a crown representing sovereignty. Each turn you drew a card from the event deck, then chose one of the outcomes to move your pieces across the game board. You would immediately draw another card if you landed on the Turning Point space. The first player to have two pieces at the finish line would win the game.

I created this game when I was 15 and didn’t have a great grasp of East Asian geopolitics. Looking back, I realize that the country of China is represented by the flag of only one of the modern states claiming the territory (not ideal) and the country of Japan is represented by the Imperial Japanese war flag (also not ideal). If I were to make it again, I would represent China and Japan with less controversial symbols, like a dragon for China and a chrysanthemum for Japan.