<h2>Description</h2>
<p>Holiday Escape was a week-long escape room installation designed and built through the collaborative effort of 16 graduate and undergraduate students. The project involved the design, implementation, and integration of various codebreaking, strategy, and skill-based puzzles for teams of 5-7. Several of these included custom electronics such as microcontroller-driven buttons, lights, solenoids, and locks in combination with traditional combination locks.
<img src="/assets/escaperoom-map.jpg" alt="Electronic map puzzle">
The second stage of the escape room (the train) featured a live view out the "windows" of the train using 2 TVs driven by a Unity scene, which become interactive in the final puzzle where player's must all work together to press buttons located around the room based on directions from a digital character outside the window.</p>
<p>The room control system utilized a custom timer program with "cutscene" video, and provided a live video and audio feed of the full room to the game-master located outside. The puzzle master, playing the role of Jingle the Elf - leader of the elf crew that hijacked the train, was able to communicate with players in real-time via a 2-way audio stream (the train's "PA system" and some hidden microphones), in order to provide hints and comedic commentary.</p>
<p>Holiday Escape was the 2021 installment of the annual event, hosted by Worcester Polytechnic Institute's Interactive Media department. The project was pioneered by <a href="https://dodo.wpi.edu">Professor Dean O'Donnell</a> in 2017, and continued on an alternating basis through his course on Design of Interactive Experiences, and teams of volunteers in years the course was not offered. Holiday Escape was the fifth and final escape room designed and built at WPI under Dean's mentorship, and I am honored and grateful to have had the opportunity to work with him on what several attendees declared the best one yet.</p>
<p>Credit to <a href="https://jingruchenmax.github.io/index.html">Max Chen</a>, the lead puzzle designer on the project, and <a href="https://www.wpi.edu/student-experience/community/voices/darren-cole">Darren Cole</a>, our video and production expert, for the demo reel featured above.</p>
<h2>Personal Accomplishments</h2>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Led a team of 16 in all aspects of design, construction, and execution of a week-long escape room installation</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Facilitated communication of high-level design elements across multiple sub-teams, allowing work to be conducted by individual contributors in an asynchronous and decentralized manner while maintaining a cohesive vision</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Ensured on-time and on-budget completion of all deliverables despite unforeseeable obstacles</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Successfully fulfilled or delegated all responsibilities of construction lead and electronics lead during extended medical absences on build/show weeks</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Solved evolving technical design problems using a combination of software, hardware, and "low-tech" tools</p>
</li>
</ul>


Holiday Escape

<h2>Description</h2>
<p>The Call of Karen is a PC simulator comedy game about a 1950s suburban housewife whose home is invaded by Cthulhu. Play as Karen, trapped in an unhappy marriage taking care of an ungrateful child, and faced with the struggle of keeping up appearances in the face of a home gone
mad.</p>
<p>As a programmer and tech artist on a small team, I contributed to all aspects of design, development, and release.</p>
<p>We released the game for free on Steam in June of 2020, earning various awards, press coverage, and over 120,000 downloads worldwide. The game was officially sunsetted in summer of 2022 after two years of support.</p>
<h2>Personal Accomplishments</h2>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Designed and implemented HUD and menu UI</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Created custom subtitle engine and UI localization features supporting 8 languages (English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Russian, Portugese, Polish, Japanese)</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Developed high-level gameplay systems in C++ and Blueprint, streamlining implementation of gameplay mechanics and storyline</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>In-engine implementation of 2D and 3D art, including furniture interactivity and animations</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Developed/maintained callofkaren.com and carried out pre and post-release marketing and community management</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Co-authored a published research paper detailing the game’s design process and technical implementation</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h2>Lessons Learned</h2>
<h3>The Players Know Best</h3>
<p>None of the gameplay from the first playtesting build made it into the final game. It was critical for us to put the game in front of players early and often to understand what a majority of our players found funny, confusing, and stressful in order to achieve the right levels of frantic and absurd without overwhelming or frustrating players.</p>
<h3>Expect the Unexpected</h3>
<p>In addition to working with unfamiliar tools and inconsistend schedules, the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to transition to fully remote work 3 months before our intended release. By announcing our release for "Summer" rather than "June," we had unknowingly given ourselves a much-needed buffer to adapt to these rapid changes.</p>
<h3>Scope is Key</h3>
<p>The game was scoped for an estimated 2-3 months of work for a feature-complete greybox. This allowed us to manage unexpected delays gracefully, and left the majority of our 9-month timeline open for playtesting, iteration, and polish. We ultimately cut several mini-games including smoothie-making and lunch-prepping, which allowed us to achieve our beta release deadline without negatively impacting our experience goal.</p>


The Call of Karen

<h1>Personal Accomplishments</h1>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Developed a reliable zero-cost architecture utilizing Dropbox API and GCP free tier</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Successfully designed an intuitive interface for non-technical users</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Conducted ongoing user experience research and iterated quickly based on user feedback</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Led a small team in all aspects of design, development, release, and post-release support</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Created instructional materials for non-technical users to gain familiarity and comfort with the tool prior to first use</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Co-authored a published research paper detailing the project’s design process and technical implementation</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h2>Description</h2>
<p>The Jazz History Database is a non-profit organization at WPI that archives recordings, photographs, and other jazz artifacts from around the world that might otherwise deteriorate. This archive, accessible at jazzhistorydatabase.com, was previously maintained by students and faculty who built the website by hand. Our goal was to design, build and document a web-based tool to allow volunteers and international correspondents to upload digitized jazz artifacts into a simple web form that would subsequently output and publish template-based web pages.</p>
<p>The Contributor Portal empowers jazz musicians, archivists and educators from all around the world to effortlessly contribute to the JHDB’s online museum without technical barriers. It's designed to be accessible to non-technical users that might be daunted by more complex archival software, and thus comes with a video walkthrough on the landing page.</p>


Mikel Matticoli

Full Stack Engineer • UX Designer

👋 Hi!
_

Featured Projects

Mikel Matticoli

Mikel Matticoli

Full Stack Engineer • UX Designer

👋 Hi! _

Featured Projects

Mikel Matticoli

👋 Hi!
_