Hey,
I'm Prateek!

Hey, thanks for checking out my little website!I'm a fourth year Computational Media student at the Georgia Institute of Technology with concentrations in Media and Games. Succinctly, I'm a versatile developer specializing in visual design.I'm currently pursuing front-end, UI/UX, project management, and both 2D + 3D art positions post Spring 2025, ideally within the games industry. I'm also applying for a Masters degree in Human Computer Interaction in case any exciting internship opportunities arise.Beyond work, I unsurprisingly enjoy gaming and drawing in my free time, and there's probably nothing I love more than DND. There's only so much I can say in a few sentences, but the one thing you should take away about me is that I want to leave this world having created something special. So let's do it together!

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Apothecary Larry

Larry's on a quest to brew a potion, help him find the ingredients he needs in this multi-genre GBA adventure! Developed over about a month at Georgia Tech during Spring 2023, Apothecary Larry was my final project for CS2261, a final showcase of Mode 0 GBA game development in C from the ground up.

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A Tale of Possession

Haunt the halls of a perplexing manor in this top-down Unity puzzle game, unfolding a simple yet emotional narrative about a college student and an over-possessive vampire. A Tale of Possession was the final project for LMC4725, a game design class.

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Frostival

Frostival is a tiny Unreal Engine shooter project made during Fall 2023, inspired by the carnival minigames and vibes of Club Penguin.

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Willow

Willow is a mystical top-down hack n' slash adventure set in a forest beyond the veil of memory! I helped design the main character portrait, setting the standards for the art team. I also designed the dialogue boxes and GUI, made a few sprites, designed the logo, and made the promotional banner.

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Humanitarian
Barbarian

An analogue board / card game where you play as a former ax-murderer turning over a new leaf, split between the joys of a normal, moral life and the wonderful thrill of violence. I'm currently in the process of developing a digital version of the game in Unity. You can read the ruleset here.

All Projects

Current Crisis

Over half of the deadliest wildfires are caused by power line failure. The more we understand power grid resilience, the safer our communities are. And a solution lies... in gaming!Current Crisis is a Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I joined the team in August of 2023, swiftly rising to the graphics team lead by the Spring semester and working an internship for the game by the Summer of 2024.

I went home after just the first meeting and made a mock-up that would entirely reshape the project's art direction. I wanted to pitch something that made sense to me, but more importantly, facilitated the art workflow an already struggling team. I chose Magicavoxel as it is a 3D Modeling software you can teach someone under an hour. The palette based system behind Magicavoxel ensures all assets utilize the same colors, eliminating discrepancies in visual style. Voxel art is visually appealing even at low poly - at the 20x20 voxel scale, experiential differences can be easily overcome with some teaching.I was quickly asked to lead the graphics team after pitching such a large pivot to 3D. Looking back on my first mock, there are plenty of similar problems, but just like the original game, progress is slow and steady.

Over the course of my work on the game I pitched many changes to improve the UI and UX of the project. My initial "wooden" assets, while simple and clean, lacked the industrious feeling of a power grid simulation game. We also ran into a bit of an issue when the simple "blocky buttons" began filling up the left side of the screen, many of which were exceedingly situational.The most important aspect in a simulation game is screen real estate. I had to ensure the HUD did not get in the way of a player's ability to manage wildfires, assess their powerlines, or simply observe their cities.I remade the assets and reorganized the layout such that the most important buttons would be nearest to the center, and similar buttons would be bundled into contiguous categories. Menus expand and retract seamlessly, and scroll menus were employed to save space for indefinite lists, like cities and happiness modifiers. After my changes, even with an excessive amount of menus no peripheral HUD elements occupied the center of the screen. This allows players to assess their quests, manage their city power rates, and construct new tiles all while having a clear view of the map.

Dataseum, Internship,
and the future

In the Spring of 2024, I had the amazing opportunity to design an exhibit for this project. The Dataseum is an on campus museum dedicated to... well, data! Our project allows visitors to learn and understand the tradeoffs of safety, reliability, and cost when designing power grid models. The exhibit is open in the Price Gilbert Library @ GA Tech on weekdays from 9 AM - 5 PM.Aside from that, I worked alongside Dr. Daniel Molzahn in the Summer of 2024 to further develop the game, as well as designing lessons pertinent to the project for the Seth Bonder Summer camps, a program held at GA Tech aimed at teaching underprivileged high schoolers about computer science, data science, and game design.I plan to continue working on the project until my graduation in May 2025.

Incubaby

Envision a future in which gestation occurs outside of the womb. The risks of childbirth plummet, parental leave is utterly changed, and monitoring your little one just became a much more transparent affair.What societal implications do these incubators hold, what medical advances are possible with this increase in infant surveillance, and most importantly... how does the app work?

Problems + Fabulations

We were tasked with designing an app for a fictional future technology, that which could be as morally gray as we desired. Our professor had encouraged us to pursue ideas we thought would typically be "especially edgy" using a brainstorming methodology known as fabulation. The advantage of this method lies in outcome focused design, allowing for idealistic and innovative prospects.

Pooling together 50 of our most outlandish thoughts for the future, we began a selective review proces. Topics were eliminated primarily on the basis of their sociopolitical impact, availability of peer reviewed research within their respective spaces, and general feasibility as a mobile application.In an era where reproductive agency is still so uncertain in one of the most developed nations on the planet, we felt passionate about alternative yet technologically feasible futures.Our fabulations gave birth (no pun intended) to a fictional synthetic womb monitoring app, Incubaby.

Worldbuilding + Design

Incubaby is a government subsidized technology, and the leading process of delivery. Unplanned pregnancies have been made obsolete due to near perfect birth control. This, combined with Incubaby inherently having more barriers to entry, results in a decreased global birth rate. This results in more egalitarian parental leave legislation, as well as less polarizing concepts of gender and gendered societal norms.Continuous data collection of fetus growth and the normalization of pod grown children has led to a de-stigmatization of scientific surveillance, as well as an increased understanding of fetal development as a whole.The general public is familiarized with the notion of sharing their children’s development before they enter the world, and an Incubaby eventually becomes another commercially exploitable product for parents everywhere. Beyond these massive societal changes, we decided to shoot for a moral gray area by designing the app around features that made sense on paper first and foremost.

Our initial pitch focused on three core flows - a vitals tracker embedded within the incubator, an information page tracking the detail of each week of gestation, and a social feature to explore the dystopian effects of increased coparenting surveillance. "It takes a village to raise a child" and all.The abundance of egg motifs was especially on the nose for an incubator, but we felt that the concept of an egg didn’t necessarily feel feminine more so than it felt “baby”. Thus we decided to model the physical pod and our navigation icons around eggs, and introduced a yellowish orange that complimented our green as a sort of yolk color. These aesthetic choices allowed us to stay rather gender neutral while still evoking traditional parental, nurturing vibes.

Feedback + Refining

Needless to say, our initial concepts were quite flawed. Three major issues stood out to us in our feedback phase.1. Font size should be standardized.
Any more than 3 categories of font size in a mobile application is excessive.2. Fetuses are gross.
We had initially planned for a 3D rendering of a fetus in the pod on the home page itself. While we were encouraged to adress ideas that may not be stigmatized in the future, fetuses are still gross to look at today, so we decided against any camera features for the fabulation and removed the pod from the homepage.3. Our features were limited.
None of the interactive elements functioned in a capacity that was evocative of a professional medical app. We weren't doctors, but we still needed to prototype common sense features for parents. Simple considerations like "how can I monitor the history of vitals so there aren't any anomalies overnight" were complete oversights. The final version of the app doubled down on the informative pages, included an abudance of revamps to the social page to drill home the adverse impacts of vital tracking, and immensely expanded the vitals tracker to an intuitive timeline to ease helicopter parents.On top of this, aesthetic changes were necessary. We had a bit of a rough time bridging the sterile, informative nature of current medical interaction design with that of current consumer baby associations, but ultimately, colorful pastels allowed us to strike a balance that wasn’t too infantile, no pun intended.

You can view a full run through of the app's features below.

Lessons

Purely from a UI design standpoint, there were a few key lessons to takeaway.1. Identify how serious (or unserious) your app is
User interfaces have identities, generally reflecting those of the user base, or the parent companies. When designing an experience, archetypal expectations dictate your colors + aesthetics, element sizes, and core features offered. Users will quickly notice incongruencies in the functions of your app and the aesthetics.2. Standardize, even in unserious contexts
Font size standardization is the basis of UI design. Legibility comes first, but it's necessary to play into existing expectations when designing apps of medical importance. That said, I also learned to break boundaries - a medical app can be intuitive, information dense, but aesthetically playful on top of that.3. Consider user edge cases
Core to fabulation is thinking outlandishly. Even when provided the green light to "design dubiously", if you fail to consider edge cases or missing features, you're bound to alienate part of your user base.4. Make moral ambiguity abundantly intentionalThis one is more about fabulation as a design method and less about UI design.I initially went into this with the somewhat flawed idea that people would universally love the idea of synthetic wombs, simply based on initial research finding the concept to be very popular with women. The result of a pregnancy’s encumbrance, permanent body damage, and ridiculous pain felt like sufficient enough reasons for this to be the most widely accepted option if it existed.I learned quite early on from my peers that designing any technology with such hubris is inherently flawed. Identify the moral failings of your designs and work to correct them. And if your professor lets you, maybe lean into them a bit.But always stay humble. Like a baby.

Kitty Klepto

Casey is a cat. A kleptomaniac cat.Help this cat burglar return their stolen goods as stealthily as possible in Kitty Klepto, a 3D interactive narrative final project for LMC2730 in the GA Tech Spring of 2024, featuring time based minigames, pixelation shaders, chromatic aberration, and a detailed neon city environment.

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