I'm interested in the research behind and design of software systems, focusing on Game Design, Human-Computer Interactions (HCI), and Affective Computing. These allow me to take a user/player-centric design approach and help bridge the worlds of the people who design systems and the people who use them.

Right now, I'm designing, implementing, and testing EMgine (Emotion Engine), a software library for evaluating what emotion a computer-controlled game character (Non-Player Character) is experiencing in the current game state. My goal is to improve the character's believability to emotionally engage players and enhance their engagement with the game as a whole.

I'm creating EMgine so that game designers retain maximum control over their characters' in-game behaviours. This means that game designers decide when, how, and which elements of EMgine to use. To this end, I'm applying my software design skills and a rigorous design process to ensure that the decisions driving EMgine's development are well informed, documented, and easy for others to understand. You can check out the progress on EMgine's development on GitHub.

In pursuit of believable game characters "with emotion", I've also developed a mod(ification) for the popular game, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. For this mod (named GLaDOS after the character from Portal) , I designed and ran a user study to get a preliminary evaluation of character believability and player interest. It was encouraging to know that my participants are eager to see where this work can take games!