Mythology Suite
In my senior year at the University of Arkansas I took a special class aimed at exploring game design and classic Greek mythology and literature. Over the course of the semester, I independently developed a number of game projects related to the text we were reading, Homer's Odyssey. One year later during my first year of graduate studies, I took a followup course that taught more advanced concepts in a team setting using the Epic of Gilgamesh and Jason and the Golden Fleece. This suite of games, developed in Unity, are listed below.​​ Each project includes a write-up explaining the project in more detail. Enjoy!
JRPG (The Jason RPG)
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Affectionately referred to as JRPG by the team, The Jason RPG was the final project for the advanced game design course and involved the entire class collaborating on a single game. Exploring Jason and Medea's development in the latter half of Jason and the Golden Fleece, the game plays off the tropes of the classic Japanese role-playing game.
The Lemnian Women
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The third team project assignment had two requirements. The first was to depict an event from the first half of Jason and the Golden Fleece. The second was to address the issue of how women are portrayed in games, and to tie that into the themes of the epic.
Mortality
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An exercise in "themes as gameplay", Mortality symbolizes one of the larger messages in the Epic of Gilgamesh. There are two ways to play the game, each acting as its own commentary on Gilgamesh by exploring the central theme from two angles.
The Bromance of Gilgamesh

We kicked off the second semester of advanced game design with a game jam designed to help get us students acquainted with one another. The result was a quick take on the first half of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Nostos
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The final project of the initial course, Nostos was designed to encompass the Odyssey as a thematic whole. Consisting of three distinct "stages" with unique gameplay features in each, Nostos combines everything I learned over the course of the semester.
Beggar's Feast
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Beggar's Feast explores the idea of "dialogue as gameplay". Ultimately, the game is a large logic puzzle embedded into the conversations held between Odysseus and the suitors that have taken hold of his palace. A large focus of the project was in asset creation – the palace and furniture were all developed by me using Cinema 4D (my first time using such software).
The Flight of Hermes
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My first game developed in Unity from scratch, The Flight of Hermes plays like a cross between a racing game and a rail shooter. Using a "rail system" I coded myself, the player must race against time to deliver a message to Calypso. One of the challenges of the assignment was to focus on "gameplay over graphics" (a philosophy I enthusiastically support), so the entire game was built using primitives such as cubes, spheres, and cylinders.
Thrinacia
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While not a game per se, my Thrinacia landscape was part of an assignment meant to test one's level and terrain design skills without being restricted to gameplay mechanics that could be developed by a student over the course of a week. In other words, students were encouraged to imagine a set of gameplay mechanics (without actually coding them) and design a level around them.
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Thrinacia explores an episode of the Odyssey using mechanics similar to those found in games like StarCraft or Pikmin. Unfortunately, being simply a landscape and not an actual game, this is the only item in the suite without a playable build to accompany it.
Jetpack Lerpz Mod
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The first assignment of the first course was to mod the Lerpz Unity tutorial game that introduced us to developing in Unity. Leveraging my talents as a programmer, I dug into Lerpz's code to turn his jetpack's descent function into a full-blown flight mechanic. I also played around with the in-game assets to build a custom level designed to explore the gameplay potential of the jetpack mod.
(...But Taylor, this doesn't have anything to do with mythology!)