World Building specialist
Spatial Design and Technical Art for games, theater, film, and anywhere there's a world.
Build and manage your own museum! Discover, clean, and display over 350 relics from around the world. Run expeditions, auction extras, and boost profits with your gift shop. Curate rare exhibits and turn your museum into a must-see destination!
Release:
PC ~ Q1 2027
Role:
Art Direction · Lead Environment Design · Technical Art
Museum Simulator is a museum-building and management game where players transform an abandoned city building into a thriving and / or completely chaotic - museum. Players renovate and customize the space, manage visitors, build their reputation, and collect wonders from across the human world and beyond.
I serve as Art Director and Lead Environment Designer, developing the visual direction and designing the architectural foundation of the museum.
Designing a Museum
The museum needed to feel like a place that could actually exist: a building with architectural logic, circulation, history, and spaces that naturally lead visitors from one experience to another.
At the same time, it needed to function as a flexible game space. Players can choose which rooms to renovate and how to customize them, while the size and configuration of those rooms influence the exhibits and progression available to them.
I researched real museum architecture and developed modular environment pieces that could be assembled into a building that felt grounded in reality while allowing for a little bit of impossible, game-specific design.
Architecture as a Game System
One of the most interesting challenges was making the building support multiple paths through progression.
The player might renovate one room before another, expand an existing space, or change the layout entirely. The architecture therefore had to remain visually coherent while accommodating different gameplay possibilities.
I approached the museum as both an architectural space and a game system, using principles of circulation, sightlines, scale, and spatial hierarchy to guide the player without making the building feel like a sequence of corridors.
The goal was to create a museum that could breathe: open spaces, clear destinations, and opportunities for discovery rather than a maze of narrow rooms.
Lighting and Interactive Environments
My work on the environment extended beyond modeling and layout. I also scripted interactive environmental elements and worked on lighting and sound design to give the spaces more atmosphere and responsiveness.
Lighting became an important tool for shaping the player's experience of the museum - directing attention, establishing mood, and helping different exhibits and spaces feel distinct.
Above is an example of an interactive environment element I created: the Renovation Doors indicate areas that are currently inaccessible, while signaling a possible progression path for the player.
Rather than simply hiding the next room behind an opaque barrier, I wanted to give players a sense of what they were working toward. The cloudy glass provides a glimpse of the room's size and shape without revealing everything, allowing players to anticipate what might become available after renovation.
The doors also communicate their unavailable state through interaction rather than relying entirely on a UI popup. When the player tries to open them, the door shutters against its restraints while the chain around the handles swings and clangs, reinforcing that the space is not yet accessible.
I enjoy using environmental elements like this to communicate gameplay information. The space itself can tell the player what they can do, what they can't do yet, and what might be waiting for them next - without breaking their immersion.
Designing Spaces to Be Discovered
My background in theatrical scenic design strongly influences how I approach game environments.
In theater, a space has to communicate information from a performer's and audience's perspective: where should attention go, what should be revealed, and how should a space feel as someone moves through it?
In Museum Simulator, those questions become interactive. The player controls their own movement and discovery, so architecture becomes part of the gameplay itself.
The project has been an opportunity to bring together many parts of my practice - architectural research, drafting, scenic design, environment modeling, spatial psychology, interactive systems, and programming - and explore how familiar real-world spaces can be transformed into something that only works as a video game.
Museum Simulator is currently in development, with an active community on our Discord!
October 2025: Most recently the team went to the Midwest Game Developer conference in Wisconsin to share updates. Promotional flyer below:
