Madelyn Rae Veccia

Game and Interactive Media Designer and Writer

• Education, Experience, & About Me

Memoirscape

Memoirscape is a cozy, untimed, immersive experience that asks guests to become participants in the first live demonstration of Dr. Julia Adler’s work on interactive memories—reconstructing, for this first test, Dr. Adler’s own happy memory of the summer of 1986 in her grandmother’s apartment, the last she spent there before heading off to college.I worked with the narrative team to develop the story for this interactive experience, pulling from my own experiences of a queer woman to create an authentic story. I also acted as Dr. Julia Adler during the run of the room performing live for those exploring the space as the absentminded professor.

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Construction Dysfunction is a co-operative LEGO building game where one player, the Architect, has access to the instructions and the other, the Builder, has access to the LEGO pieces. Neither player can see the other's materials so they must communicate and work together to complete the build. This task is made all the more difficult by the puzzles the two players must solve in order to uncover the instructions they need.

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Capacity Building Website

A website designed to assist users' learning about the concepts of capacity building. I was the lead graphic designer for this project. I also focused on developing interactive design ideas to communicating them to the implementation team.

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Education

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Interactive Media and Game Design Bachelor of Arts Degree
Graduated May 2024Currently Perusing Masters of Fine Arts in Interactive Media and Game Design
Graduating May 2026

About Me

My name is Madelyn "Maddie" Rae Veccia. I use She/Her/Hers pronouns and I love making narrative focused interactive experiences! I graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in May 2024 with a Bachelors of Arts in Interactive Media and Game Design. I am currently perusing my Masters of Fine arts in Interactive Media and Game design still at WPI. While at WPI I earned the IMGD community Award in 2023 for the active roll I take in the IMGD community. I also earned the IMGD Outstanding Innovation Award as a part of my Major Qualifying Project team in 2024.Aside from all of that, I am a proud trans woman who deeply believes in the power that comes from community and mutual support. I feel very lucky to have friends and a community that supports my authentic self and lifts me up to be the best version of myself every day. I also enjoy baking and running a Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) campaign for my friends!

What is the Heisters?

The Heisters was a project I took on in a group with 2 other students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Our goal was to create a game that could be played with objects that could be found in a home and who's instructions would fit on 2 pages. This project showcases my work in game and graphic design.

Rules Sheet Final Version

Rules Sheet Final Version

Capacity Building Project Summary

The capacity building guide was a project I undertook in a team with other students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). We were tasked with translating a 40 page guide to the concept of capacity building to an easily approachable website that encourages users to learn at their own pace.The website can be accessed via the link below

• Capacity Building Guide

Interaction Design

I was one of the lead interaction designers for this project. One of our main goals for this website was to obfuscate the sheer mass of material from our readers as to create a less intimidating reading experience. This can be seen clearly in our expandable main page (shown in images below). This page, at first, is simple and approachable. However, it can expand to show every section and subsection of the capacity building guide. This allows our users to slowly embark on the task of learning capacity building without overwhelming them with information.

This is only one example of the many methods of obfuscation we implored to create an approachable site. We also worked to include many accessibility elements to this site. As a neurodivergent person, this aspect of the site was very important to me and I worked to ensure that we could provide options to make this site comprehensible to as wide an audience as possible.

Graphic Design

I was the graphic design lead on this project. I developed the color and design pallets we used throughout the entire website. We used the program Figma to demo these design concepts and communicate them to the implementation team.The design of this website was created to be fun and inviting to those navitating it and learning capacity building. I took these ideas to heart when designing the various web pages and menus. I used bright colors that would shift depending on which section of the guide you were in to add some diversity to the pages. I focused on soft shapes and colors to put the user at ease when reading. Example pages can be seen in the images below or by going to the capacity building website itself.

• Capacity Building Guide

Home for the Holidays Escape Room

Home for the Holidays was an escape room I was on the development team for in late 2023. We ran the room for one week and had over 120 people participate and try to escape! The room was themed around a 1980s Christmas with a mysterious time loop and an enigmatic professor. The players had to unravel clues and puzzle in order to escape the room before the time loop ended.I was the narrative chair for this project. I facilitated the narrative team and ensured that we were able to integrate our story into the puzzles and design of the room itself. My team and I wrote scripts, trained student actors, and interfaced consistently with other teams throughout this project.Pictured below is the entire escape room team!

On the News

During the run of this escape room we were featured on both Spectrum News 1 and The Worcester Telegram and Gazette. The links to these articles can be viewed below (The Worcester Telegram and Gazette requires a subscription for viewing).

• Spectrum News 1 Article

• The Worcester Telegram and Gazette Article

Real Project Experience

This project provided me with the experience of working on a complex interactive media project. As mentioned previously, I took on a leadership role in this project as the narrative chair for this project. I worked to organize our writing team to develop a story for the escape room and integrate it into the puzzles and set pieces of the escape room.Before we began development on the escape room we went through a process of pitching ideas for what we wanted the escape room to be. I was part of the team who's pitch won and turned into the final escape room. This provided me with a firm understanding of the narrative that I used to assist in my leadership of the narrative team. In the end we were able to create an interactive experience with homogenized story and gameplay elements.Below is a link to a full video of the escape room!

• Full Escape Room Video

What is the Free Body Diagram App?

The Free Body Diagram App was a project I was apart of during the summer of 2023. I worked on a small team to renovate an app designed to teach college students about physics free body diagrams through interactive games. I was new to this project team at the time and the first version of the app had already been released and used by students. Our job was to clean up any bugs and overhaul some of the less intuitive games in the app. The app was developed on unity and playable on iOS for WPI students in the fall 2023 semester.

Personal Project

The explorer journals started out as a class assignment for an undergraduate course focused on writing characters for games. We were tasked to tell the story of a character through the format of loose journal entries that could be found in any order. I decided to tell the story of an older woman surviving in a zombie apocalypse. The story isn't the reason this project stuck with me, its how I was able to tell that story. I put on a voice and performed it for some of my friends and really enjoyed it. That got me interested in more interactive narrative work and was the catalyst for me starting a Dungeons and Dragons campaign in April of 2023 that I still run. Telling stories through interactive media is something that is very special to me and this project felt like the begining of that journey for me.A full text version of the journals in order can be viewed at the bottom of this page.

Full Story

Journal Entry 1:
It’s been a week now in this old house. Gerald is a swine, but he wasn’t lying about this house, it is very defensible. I have plenty of space, fresh water nearby, and the forest is filled with game I’ve been using to sustain myself. No trouble from any infected so far, but I hear them shuffling around at night. I’m not too far from the settlement either if I need supplies. It’s very secluded here; I’ve only seen a few others around these parts. Most people are just passing by, on their way to some false hope of safety. There have been these kids I’ve seen more than once. The oldest among them couldn’t be more than sixteen years old, and they all look terrified. They’ve seen me a couple of times, but they’ve never come up to my house. I don’t want any trouble with them; as long as they keep their distance, I’ll keep mine.
Journal Entry 2:
The garden is doing better than I expected. Granted, it’s very small, but there isn’t much room on the roof. Wish I could expand it further around my homestead, but if the animals don’t destroy it, the infected surely will come nightfall. I don’t need much more than this though, it’s easier taking care of a smaller number of plants. If only I could get my hands on those pepper seeds, but Gerald is asking the most ridiculous prices for them. His shop in the settlement is the only place around here that’ll have them though. Hopefully I can find some on my own.
Journal Entry 3:
Those kids are back again. I haven’t seen them in a few days, but I noticed they were meandering around last night. It’s as if they don’t know those infected are more active at night. The kids look in worse shape than ever, and I think they have lost one of their number. I expected them to move on after a few days, maybe find a permanent stronghold, but they’re just wandering around like lost dogs. I feel sorry for them, but there’s nothing I can do. Letting them in here would put me at an extreme risk. I have to put them out of my mind, I’ve got to protect myself, nobody else.
Journal Entry 4:
I took a trip to the settlement today. It had grown since I left, they even have a leader now. Some John character is in charge, can’t remember his last name, like that really matters anymore. He spoke to me, but I didn’t give him the time of day. He wanted me to come back and help to grow the settlement further. I wasn’t hearing any of it; you ask me, that place is a ticking time bomb waiting to blow. While I was in town, I had planned to buy more seeds and other supplies off Gerald, but he hiked his prices as per usual. He knows he has the only good supply in the area, but he has no right to act so selfishly. He should give us all a fair price, we’re all in the same boat here, the least he could do is have some empathy.
Journal Entry 5:
Those kids shouldn’t be outside this late at night. They’re out on the edge of the forest, and its long past nightfall. I could have warned them, I suppose, when I saw them foraging earlier today, but I- (this entry abruptly ends).
Journal Entry 6:
I was hoping I could keep that shotgun unused till the day I die, but that didn’t happen. I had no choice; I saw those kids being attacked and had to do something. I got there in time to save four of them, but I had to put the last one down before he got worse. The look on his face was terrifying, but I did what I had to. I let them stay the night of course; I’m not sending them out now that the infected are swarming the area. I’m going to send them packing first thing in the morning though, no use in endangering myself more than I already am.
Journal Entry 7:
So, I let those kids stay a few days more. I couldn’t send them back out there; the way they were talking, it’s as if they didn’t know the first thing about surviving. They knew how to get by, barely, but they didn’t know how to live properly in times like these. Some of them told me they used to live in the settlement but were kicked out because they couldn’t provide anything. That’s exactly why I left that disgraceful place. They are only kids what were they supposed to do. I had to teach them a thing or two, just to keep them alive longer than a day. This one kid, her name was Sandra, took a real interest in my small garden. She is very kind, I told her that learning how to grow her own food is a useful skill in these times. Now this other one, Tommy, he acted like a rough and tough leader type, but I reckon he cares for the rest of them more than they realize. The twins on the other hand are funny. They managed to coax some laughs out of me, I hadn’t laughed that hard in a long time. It’s good that they have each other, it was nice having them around.
Journal Entry 8:
I haven’t written in this old book for a long time. I haven’t needed to, not since those damn kids came along and kept me busy. It’s been a full year since I took them in. Originally, I had some fanciful idea about sending them packing, but I couldn’t live without them now. Sandra has made a beautiful extension to the rooftop garden. Now we can grow hanging plants along with the one we already have. Tommy has really grown into a strong young man, I’m very proud of him. Saved my life on multiple occasions, I’m not afraid to admit. The twins are still an absolute delight. They get under my nerves every now and again, but I wouldn’t trade them for the world. That goes for all of them now I think on it. They have brought a spark into my life I’ve been missing for a long time. I would do anything for these lovely kids.