important links
about the project
Path Pursuit is a game project designed and developed as a New Media Design and New Media Interactive Development capstone project, with a prompt and guidance from the Strong National Museum of Play. It is an in-person cooperative game that tasks two players with navigating a path in sync across two separate screens using custom physical controllers.
my role
- Establishing the visual identity of the game and coordinating art
- Designing visual assets, including the mascot character
- Implementing assets into the game
- Creating procedural animations and effects in p5.js
goals
Create a unique physical game experience for Imagine RIT
Evoke game show nostalgia through the visuals and gameplay
Build a visual design that is loud and silly, but readable
how it started
At the start of our New Media Design cohort’s last semester of college, we were given a surprise announcement about the capstone project we would be working on for the next semester: unlike previous years, we would be working with a client. I was excited to learn that our client, who would be supporting and guiding us through the project, was Rochester’s Strong Museum of Play. We were to create interactive installations themed around the Strong’s upcoming Beyond the Buzzer exhibit about the history and design of game shows.
Our first task was to get together in our teams to pitch three ideas to representatives of the Strong, from which they would pick their favorite for our team to work on. We brainstormed ideas around three core game show concepts: guessing, trivia, and physical challenges. The Strong loved our idea for incorporating physical challenges: Path Pursuit.
art direction
After the pitching process, we had the hard work of transforming the initial concepts that our team member, Joy, created for the initial pitch into a full, scalable graphic identity. Our art direction team, with representatives from the UI/UX and development teams, came up with a list of words to define our goals: silly, loud, friendly, and readable.
bam bastic
The centerpiece of our visual design for the project was our mascot character, Bam Bastic, a daredevil dog who guides the player through the game experience. Joy created the original design for the character, but after the pitch, Joy, Lily, and I got to work ideating how to create Bam version 2.
We spent hours sketching together on whiteboards, sharing inspiration from 90s video game and cereal mascots, and compiling initial vector designs. When we each had a vector Bam, we brought them into Figma to begin a rather strange process: we Frankensteined our Bam designs together into what would become the final Bam that we love. Build-a-Bam Workshop became a fun inside joke among our team.
game art
I also worked on coordinating the background art and visual game elements for Path Pursuit. We wanted to channel the design of humorous physical game shows like Wipeout and Hole in the Wall, which blend the physicality of scaffolding and mechanical elements with bright bursts of color. It became a challenge to create a game screen that looked fun and physical, while still allowing players to read what was interactable and what was a background element. Keeping the background monochromatic, with bright, outlined foreground elements, helped us strike that balance.
development
In addition to my work on the art team, I also worked on the development side to implement the visual identity into the game and create custom effects and animations through code. Our game primarily ran the game logic in the Node.js backend, with the graphics drawn to the dual screens using p5.js.
I was responsible for turning the game data from the backend into a beautiful player-facing experience. I built custom tools for drawing the path, checkpoints, and animated background elements. But the highlight was my animated Bam rig, which could follow a given point, change facial expressions, and even speak in a gibberish language, all built to be controlled through backend calls.
awards & recognition
We were awarded the Crowd Favorite Award (chosen by audience votes) and the Best in Show Award (chosen by faculty judges) at the 2025 RIT Experiential Design and Games Expo. At Imagine RIT, we had a near-constant line for our exhibit and estimate that around 300 people played over the course of the day. Our exhibit was covered on local new stations including WXXI, 13 WHAM, and Fox Roc, with members of our team getting interviewed about the project.
conclusion
Path Pursuit was a strange but incredibly wonderful creative collaboration. We were very lucky to have a team that worked incredibly well together and covered every element needed to complete our project. On the visual design side, I worked with three other incredible designers in incredibly collaborative ways to establish and build out our visual design. On the development side, we had every element, physical controllers and Arduino code, the Node.js backend, game logic, and front-end effects and graphics, covered perfectly by our team. While there were some challenges with scope, our team worked well to meet our challenges and exceed our expectations.
