Design Your Destiny

Writer and creator of the original concept behind Design Your Destiny, a genuinely novel book from Off the Page Games that blends a story with a hands-on course in board game design. The core idea was to teach game design through narrative: readers follow Charlie and Natalie as they get thrust into the future, and every couple of chapters they play a game as the characters navigate their new surroundings. Each of those games is deliberately broken in some way, and the following pages guide the reader through fixing it, teaching real game-design concepts while leaving room to change the game however they want, all the way up to a final game left completely open for the reader to design themselves.

Bringing the concept to life meant teaming up with Jay Cormier of Off the Page Games to develop the story and series. This project also let me finally write a time travel story! The finished book adds clever layers of engagement, readers earn stickers as they read, play, and design, working toward fixing the characters' time machine and unlocking the final chapter, and it ships with free educator resources so teachers and group leaders can run it with a class or club. It is an approachable, genuinely original way to learn how games are made.