Pete Lannon

My Number One Boy is a prototype for a playful and silly adventure game in which you guide, protect, and care for your Boy in an open world full of quests to be completed (or ignored) and distractions aplenty. Part silly dad-sim, part frustrating open world exploration, the game draws on my own experience of parenthood and the joyful, exasperating responsibilities that come with being the person nominally in charge of a chaotic and inquisitive young child.

Your Boy may not always listen to you, and, while you may have a to do list of quests to complete, he is much more interested in exploring, playing, and eating donuts.

How can games allow their players to construct and inhabit different masculinities, and what does it look and sound like for those masculinities to be rooted in something other than patriarchal images of men as conquerors, heroes, or rulers? My Number One Boy is an attempt to ask this question.

Placed in the role of a father of a Boy, you have a list of quests to accomplish, but your Boy has other ideas – ideas that may get him into trouble. Can you complete your to do list while keeping your Boy happy and healthy? Should you? The game seeks to present game mechanics and sounds of hegemonic masculinity: achieving mastery over the environment or enemies and control over your avatar, completing challenges and scoring points. It aims to juxtapose these with alternatives necessitated by your Boy’s own desires: guiding, nurturing, and helping.

Boy voiced by Oran (age 3).

Game design, character modelling, sound design and music by Pete Lannon (age 37).

Failure Machine is a prototype of a robot-building game exploring wonky physics and unexpected sound generation.

It is a game about making things, those creations not always working out, and the unexpected results of failure.

It is also an interactive journal game made in Twine, an art-writing piece documenting the experience of the game’s creation and the impulses behind it.

Created in Unity and using FMOD. The player can assemble a “robot” from a selection of materials, each with their own physics quirks and sound. Objects can be duplicated, enlarged, or destroyed. Once built, the player has limited control over their “robot”, applying force to their creation and watching it bounce or flail around the world, each different mix of body parts creating its own strange soundscape.

Echo Escape is a demo of a game in which you play as an Orca navigating the Strait of Gibraltar. Navigating with your echolocation, you must avoid the boats that swarm the strait and their destructive noise pollution.Echo Escape was an attempt to design a game with audio at its heart, tying the visual fidelity with the “echo” object and creating a responsive audio design that gave the player information about their environment and the dangers within. Using FMOD to create audio triggers and snapshots that transition between environments and change audio parameters based on proximity to other objects, boat size, and the orca’s status.

I created the music and the sound design for the gameplay, and implemented the dynamic audio.

Created as part of the Audio for Games elective with students from the Serious Games and Virtual Reality Course.

Designed by Marius Richter, Tianwei Yang and Pete Lannon.