Rebecca Novis
Hi! I'm Rebecca Novis, a student at Boise State University in the Games, Interactive Media, and Mobile Technology (GIMM) major. I have experience working in Unity for a variety of projects, including 2D, 3D, and VR projects. I’m also proficient in some Adobe products, including Photoshop and Premiere Pro. I love working on projects that require me to think creatively and that push my skill set. I am most interested in game development, but I am also enthusicatic about web development.
Website
Website
Website
Interactive Comic
2D Video Game
Star Bay is a 2D platformer I developed in Unity. In the game, you navigate the wreckage of your base in order to reach the safety of the Star Bay. Along the way, you are expected to collect stars, avoid meteors, and continue moving before the wreckage of the base falls away from you.
This was my first video game I developed independently in Unity. Through this project, I learned much about using Unity and programming in C#, as I was only somewhat familiar with Unity and C# prior to making this game. I created several different game mechanics for this game, including platforms that fall away after the player collides with them, meteors that damage the player, and a key item the player must collect in order to complete the second level. I had difficulty making each mechanic work properly, but with each new addition I made to my game, my understanding of Unity and C# grew.
The first mechanic I implemented was the falling platforms. While I can look back at my code now and recognize its simplicity, I in fact spent several hours researching how to get the desired outcome. The result was the script FallingPlatform, in which I created a function called killIt() that disables the platform’s rigidbody’s isKinematic by setting it to false, allowing the platform to be affected by the physics of the scene. Then, after half a second, the platform is destroyed. This function is invoked two seconds after the player collides with the platform. This gives the player two seconds to jump off the platform before it falls away from under them. For a closer look at on the code for this project, you can view my Github repository for the game here.
Aside from coding, I also drew four sprites in Procreate: the meteorites, the buildings you enter at the end of each level, and the nebula key. The yellow and red collectable stars were created in Photoshop.
Creating Star Bay was a challenging endeavor, but I am proud of creating a fun and challenging platformer, with a story tying it together.
Download the game build from Github
Unity, C#, Adobe XD, Illustration, Procreate,
Writing, Conceptualization, Communication, Teamwork
Pursuit of Time is an interactive comic developed in Unity. The interactive comic is about the bi-linear flow of time, and the journey of Janus, a teenage girl, as she explores her past and future in order to avoid a grim fate.
The interactive comic is a mix of the comic and video game mediums, with interactivity taking form in visual novel style dialogue and 2D side scrolling exploration. Most of my contributions were in the conceptualization and writing of the story, as well as maintaining the organization of our group. I also created some of the art and dialogue in the comic, and helped troubleshoot the code.
This project was the result of a collaborative effort to create an interactive comic about a prompt given to us by our professor: the bilinear flow of time. A bilinear flow of time is a theory from quantum physics, and essentially boils down to the idea that time flows both forwards and backwards. In other words: the future affects the past just as much as the past affects the future. With such a broad and complex topic, the group and I initially struggled to decide on what our comic should be about, and how to best add interactivity in order to connect to the stories' themes and concepts.
We tossed around many ideas throughout our initial meetings, with the gameplay and story frequently changing and evolving. Some of our initial ideas included the main character using a clock to navigate through time and drawing the comic in a circular format so it could be read in any direction. However, as we continued to talk about and work on the interactive comic, our concept for it continued to shift until the final product was finished. Even our storyboard made using Adobe XD, while mostly true to the final product, still contains some ideas left in there that never made it into our final project.
I had a lot of fun coming up with ideas for this project, especially since concepts related to time loops, time travel, and the general nature of time are particularly compelling to me. While working on this project, two pieces of media that I drew a lot of inspiration from were the movies Tenet (2020) and Arrival (2016), and the way they each handled the flow of time. The video game Braid was another core inspiration for me, particularly in how the final level demonstrated that by changing the flow of time, the context of events happening shifted drastically.
Pursuit of Time does not have a huge plot twist like the above stories. Instead, it takes a much more mundane approach to the concept of a bilinear flow of time, asking what we can learn from and embrace about it in our day to day lives. Thinking about these stories in relation to my own life experiences led me to push for the main theme of our game: that time may be uncertain, but by embracing life moment by moment it becomes easier to navigate. If you are interested in further insight into some of my inspirations while working on Pursuit of Time, see my rhetorical analysis of the interactive comic here.
I wrote and drew two comics for Pursuit of Time, one set in Janus’ past, and another in her future. I am much more practiced in creative writing than I am in illustration, but I am happy with how the two comics strips I created turned out, as I believe they effectively convey the ideas I was aiming for.
I had a minimal role in the programming for this project, but whenever bugs or unexpected issues arose in our Unity project, I assisted in troubleshooting and fixing the problems.
Sustainability and Systems Thinking In Chemistry Education (SaSTICE) is a website intended to provide information and resources to chemistry educators on how to incorporate systems thinking into their teaching. I was brought onto a small team working professionally for the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) to begin development for this website from February 2023 until April 2023. I worked on this website alongside two other students, Gamma Gamel and Carson McMahan, and my professor, Jack Polifka. My primary contributions to the website involved user experience testing, as well as creating a mockup design.
As part of my work, I created a mockup for the website using Adobe XD, which can be viewed here. Each of the other members of the team created a mockup of their own as well, and sought feedback from the client about what they liked and disliked about each one. The client noted that they liked the look and format of the search page and projects page in my mockup. However, they did not like how much I leaned into the IUPAC’s branding, particularly in regards to the colorscheme. In addition to the feedback received on my teammate’s mockups, the four of us were able to get greater insight into what the clients wanted from the website.
Our team also performed user experience testing and research in order to decide the organization of the navigation bar for the website. To do this, we first asked our clients to provide us with a list of the various pages they planned to display on the SaSTICE website. With the list of navigation categories from our client, we first wanted to simplify the names of each item, as several included jargon that may have made navigation more difficult. To do this, we provided a survey to various educators at Boise State University, asking them how they would simplify the phrasing given to us by the client. This allowed us to ensure that the language used made sense to the target demographic of the website.
In order to determine the best order for the navigation, we utilized open card sorting. I contacted and tested three participants: a chemistry professor, an undergraduate studying biology and chemistry, and an undergraduate studying UX design. Including the participants I gathered, our team was able to receive results from a total of eight participants. We focused our efforts on finding participants that were educators and/or within the field of chemistry, since the focus of the website was chemistry education.
After receiving feedback from our client about the results of our UX testing, we then began working to create the website using Wordpress. My involvement in this process was minimal, and I primarily provided feedback to professor Polifka about design changes I thought would benefit the website.
Working on this website was a fantastic opportunity, and taught me how to better communicate with a client in order to provide desired results. For example, creating mockups helps the client identify what they do or don’t want to see in the final product, without needing to spend the time and resources to create the full website. Furthermore, card sorting is a very effective method in determining what will make the most sense to the average user, creating a better user experience for more people.
This website displays my statistical analysis of how items are implemented in The Legend of Zelda series. I gathered information on every item used across the Zelda franchise, such as what game they first appeared in, and how many games each item appeared in across the series. Then, I displayed this data using data visualizations.
This was my first big broject utilizing what I had learned about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Node.js, and MySQL. I gathered and analyzed all of the data myself, then displayed them using a variety of data visualizations, the majority of which were made with d3.js. I also began using MySQL databases to hold my data for some visualizations.
This website was created as a proof of concept for how reservations for bowling lanes at Boise State’s Games Center could be made, stored, accessed, and edited online. I developed this website independently for a class. Working on this website expanded my skills with using MySQL as a data storage system, as well as designing a variety of website interfaces.
I chose to make a prototype for a reservation system, because at the time of making this website, I was working at BSU’s Games Center, and I had noticed how the reservation system was less efficient than it could have been. So, I attempted to create a website that could streamline the process of both making and storing reservations, simplifying the process for both customers and employees.
I created the front end pages with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, aiming for a simple, clean look. I utilized MySQL, Node.js, and express.js to connect the front end to the back end server and database hosted on phpMyAdmin. I created the website according to REST and CRUD APIs.
Code snippet from reservation.js
Full code from connection.js
Code snippet from index.js
