Little Shop of Horrors

Going through my stuff, I rediscovered this game that I made as a group project in graduate school. The game was based off of the musical Little Shop of Horrors and we used a quirky 2D, top-down, Legend of Zelda point of view for all of the levels.

In the game, the player interacts as Seymore, the nerdy flower boy who discovers a blood guzzling alien flower that he uses to impress his one true love, Audrey. The player must follow the "Horrors" storyline while keeping both Seymore and his plant's blood/health meters high enough to stay alive. This results in some morally questionable behavior on Seymore's part as the plant requires progressively larger amounts of blood to survive.

The game featured several levels which were easily navigable by walking the Skid Row street level as shown above. These levels are generally places where Seymore can gather sources of blood for his plant. The levels pictured below are (from Right to Left) the Mad Dentist's office, the Animal Testing Lab, and the Old Cat Lady's House.


Seymore is able to collect an inventory of flowers, tools and food sources for his plant from the different levels of the game. The picture to the left of Seymore at a blood bank shows the player collecting a blood bag from the blood bank level. The blood bag is automatically placed in the player's inventory. This inventory is conveniently labeled "Stuff". The blood can then be taken by Seymore back to his flower shop where he can feed his plant. Once back at the shop, Seymore can go back to his bedroom where the player can save his progress and inventory.

There is also humorous dialog between Seymore and the game's characters which guides the player through the game. These characters may inadvertently suggest that Seymore could steal a cat, kidnap a lab monkey or even kill Audrey's crazy boyfriend dentist to feed his plant. But if these same characters catch Seymore in the act, they will send him straight back to his bedroom in the flower shop with a reduction in health.

The game was an absolute blast to help make and it is hilarious to play. The game play is very quick and Seymore can move really fast around game levels, making sure things never get dull. In addition to the bizarre plot and weird characters, the player gets to hear the insanely catchy tunes from the musical throughout each level of the game.

Web Sites in Production

New Mexico Office of Border Health Homepage and Flyout Menus

This is a website I am creating for the New Mexico Office of Border Health(OBH). The OBH has no website currently in existence and the larger New Mexico Dept. of Health(DOH) is looking to revise it's current web site.

New Mexico Dept. of Health Drop Down Menu

The page I created has a banner at the top which is meant to refer to the main DOH organization. The user can navigate back to the DOH homepage from anywhere on the site by pressing the button/logo at the upper left. The user can also navigate to a DOH-specific link using the drop down menus as shown above.

Menu for the OBH contains a homepage logo/button and flyaway menus

When the user is browsing an office or bureau within the larger DOH entity such as the Office of Border Health, that office's logo and links will appear within the left column of the site. The office logo will also act as a button to the office's homepage and the left column may contain a flyaway menu as shown above.


The Promotora page above is a subdivision of the OBH which is a subdivision of the Public Health Division which is one of several divisions of the DOH. I organized the website so that the user can navigate the entire DOH through hierarchy of divisions. This is done by the blue "stackers" found in the left gray column. The current division being viewed is noted by the top blue stacker found beneath the division logo/button. This stacker is labeled as active by a white arrow pointing outward. Higher divisions can be navigated to by clicking on the stackers located below the current division's menu. These stackers are not active and are labeled with a downwards white arrow. By using these stackers, the user can navigate the entire heirarchy of the New Mexico Dept of Health.

The site was made to be expandable to any monitor size and was written using simple html, CSS, and some Javascript.

The site's content and information needs to be fully provided by the DOH before it can be posted to the web.

what I do at work

Lots of people have been asking me about what I've been doing at work and if they can see some of my projects. I've posted some of the pieces I've done on my online portfolio but I thought I would use this space to show some work in progress or photos of my work at the events they were made for.

I work for the New Mexico Office of Border Health which is a division of the New Mexico Dept of Health's Public Health Division. Basically what that means is I do a lot of graphic design and web work for health promotion events.

One such event is the Families & Youth Inc Back to School Rally. I was asked to create a full color poster for this event and this was the original version of the poster I made. The final version is posted here. The finished posters were double sided with English on the front and the Spanish version on the back.


Another one of my job responsibilities is to create, redesign and touch up the web pages that exist under the sphere of Border Health. My main responsibility is to the actual Office of Border Health website which is yet to be brought into existence, but I'm frequently asked to help out with the Region 5 websites. Region 5 is a district along the Mexico/New Mexico border. This is an image featuring the new intranet page I designed for them.

I'll probably be posting more content showing the Office of Border Health homepage when it comes closer to being finalized.

Look! Up in the Sky....

These are some shots of a game that I did for one of my Computer Science classes. The game play itself turned out to be a cross between Galaga (in that you can shoot down the meteors with heat vision) and Meteors(in that there are meteors in the game). In it you have to play as Superman and explode all of the rocks before they pass you. It's fun for a while, but like Galaga and meteors it can get kind of dull. I also got high marks on my graphics, which were all based off of Jim Lee drawings and animated together to make it appear as though Superman was flying. I ended up using C++ and SDL to write the game code because they were required by the class, but I think that if I end up making another game like this I would like to use Flash.

Free Time

During my free time in grad school I played around alot with different 3D programs like Maya and 3D Studio Max. This is a Ninja Turtle that I modeled and was rigging for animation in the Personal Learning Edition of Maya. Unfortunately, because it was free, Maya PLE has all those crazy watermarks all over it. I looked into it and found out the educational version of Maya is waaay better and now I'm updating all of my old PLE stuff. It's taking some time though. This is due to the fact that you can't open a PLE file in any other version of Maya! Oh well, back to the drawing board I guess. I'll be sure to post some of my new Maya stuff when it is ready.

The picture above is a scene from a game I made called Mars Lander. In the game, the player captains a spaceship which has suffered damages while landing on Mars. The ship is loosing oxygen and all of the ship's O2 canisters have been scattered over the surface. The player has to regain enough oxygen canisters to support his crew and dock with a landing port while navigating the strange terrain and gravity of the Martian planet.

One of the features that I included with the game was a condition where the player cannot go past a certain altitude or else he will escape the Martian gravity and be lost into outer space. This makes the game difficult because the oxygen canisters are buoyant and are slowly leaving Mars' gravity. The player's distance from the surface is calculated by the game and displayed at the base of the screen to invoke a sort of "heads up display" found in fighter planes.

In addition to floating over the planet's surface, the player can land on the surface itself. This is very difficult and can only be done on large flat areas. Once the player has touched down on the surface he can drive his craft along the terrain. However, if the ship is traveling too fast at the top off a hill it will lift off and begin floating again.

I'd definitely like to make more games, but for now it will have to happen in my free time.

Computer Stuff

This is an example of one of the things I had to do for my Master's Thesis. This is a smoke simulation, and you can see in the before shots(with the red smoke) that the environment around the smoke is acting as if it were transparent, allowing you to see through the obstacles (in blue). So one of the features I added was to visually correct the obstacles. You'll notice that the green obstacles are now partially blocking your view of the smoke due to their position in the foreground. This was done by arranging the graphics data by depth according to the camera in OpenGL.

The picture above was done for research on my thesis. I was testing out some cool effects done in smoke and this was one of the things I came up with...the spider cloud. I think I had just seen Spider-man 3 trailer or something so I thought it would be fun!