Holly Liberatore

…is a minimalist puzzle game I designed for a 2020 game jam, on a team of three developers. I managed the project GitLab and itch.io, scripted the game in Construct 3, and composed its original soundtrack. I also conceived the initial project idea: previous games created for the annual game jam were mostly platformers and top-down shooters, ergo a puzzle game such as ROPE would stand out and break the mould. It received numerous accolades:

While ROPE is currently my most successful game development project, it is far from the only one. I have published one other game, as well as a copious amount of mods for existing games.

Ghost Shooter is a linear top-down bullet hell inspired by the Binding of Isaac. I developed it in two days with the goal of learning Construct 3 for ROPE, and during development it expanded into a full game. I also composed its original soundtrack.

More World Flags is an open-source submod for Starbound, and is one of my most ambitious projects. To make my and contributors' workflows as smooth as possible, I created detailed documentation, a Paint.NET plugin written in C#, and batch files that automate JSON file creation.

Not all of my work is on video games; Death of Prosperity is a social game for 3+ players plus a Gamemaster. I co-led project development and designed the rulebook.

I also have experience in Valve's Hammer Editor; I created arena_brickmill, ctf_triplea, and koth_biggerontheinside, all maps for Team Fortress 2.

Music is one of my greatest passions, second only to game development. I'm a formally trained musician, with over ten years in percussion and several years in guitar and bass. On several occasions, I have performed as part of an ensemble or rock band. I have also taken classes for music theory, and I have composed a wide variety of original compositions, ranging from electronic to metal to minimalism. In addition, I have arranged previously composed works for an ensemble, and released recordings of my own performances.

A selection of my musical works are shown to the left.

• First Project in FL Studio and Otter Waltz demonstrate my compositional capability in DAWs such as FL Studio to create fully realised original music. Both are published as a single on BandCamp.
• Combat and Glass House are examples of music I have composed for game soundtracks. These were also created with FL Studio, and both the ROPE and Ghost Shooter original soundtracks are available on my BandCamp.
• 1234 1234 is a cover of a Streetlight Manifesto song, entirely performed and mastered in Audacity by me. It will be my only publicly available performance until the projected October 2020 release of a cover EP, in which I play drums with a rock band.
• Maxwell's Silver Hammer is a MIDI ensemble arrangement of a Beatles song originally composed by Paul McCartney. Referencing the original sheet music, I appropriated the motifs and structure into the context of a wind ensemble.

Promotional art is perhaps the most important element in marketing for any video game, immediately conveying crucial information to the consumer such as the game's atmosphere, genre, and even its production value. This skill is indispensible in a game designer's toolkit, which is why I have made it a hobby to create box art for my and others' games and software.

Selected works of mine are embedded here, including:

• Classics Collection: Half-Life 2, part of a larger Classics Collection project to create standardised box art for influential games older than 15 years. I created the template and organised the collection, and there are nine total contributors. This particular grid was made using the promotional art Bring the fight to them, the background of which I manually erased, and superimposed with the official logo.
• ROPE's promotional art is special; while my other assets were made with Paint.NET, ROPE's box art was made directly in its engine, Construct 3. I modified the title screen to dimensions 600x900, removed the begin button, and repositioned the GUI elements as needed.
• For SignMake, an unofficial Portal mapping tool, I wanted to create box art similar to its output (example). Using a sign as a reference on the bottom layer, I built the graphics on top of it, even extracting icons from the game files to use. After recreating the background and using an Aperture Laboratories logo from Wikimedia Commons, it was finished.