Portfolio.Kyle Haas

Terminus is a 2-player game of only 18 cards, and was designed for a contest.

Players assume the role of temporal empires, racing to control all of time before a cataclysmic event arrives and everything ends.

Despite the heavy theme, the gameplay is breezy and the rules fit comfortably on a single sheet of paper.

Connect is a digital puzzle game I made early in the pandemic. My goal was to build something that could be played online with others, but didn’t require any video game networking.

As a player, your goal is to connect all of the stars using the fewest number of moves. You do this by placing dots on colored squares, and forming paths of connected dots between all the stars.

You can only place a dot on a square matching one of the three colors found at the top of the screen. You can clear all three of these colors by clicking on them. Every time you place a dot, you use a move. Every time you clear the colors at the top of the page, you use a move.

Players can compete to solve the exact same puzzle by sharing the page URL, because each puzzle is seeded from a code stored as a query parameter.

It can be quite a rush to solve a puzzle using fewer moves than a friend; I recommend giving it a try!

Four Letter Words is a simple word game I designed to be played using nothing but a pencil and paper.

Players try to outlast each other by efficiently writing four letter words (no more, no less) inside a grid; this ends up feeling something like a “reverse word search”. Games are short, and can be played with many or few players.

This is perhaps my favorite of the games I’ve designed.

An abstract 2-player game I designed and then later manufactured using kiln-fired glazed ceramic.

In the game, players vie for control of a 3-by-3 grid using abstract pieces endowed with unique movement capabilities.

My intent was to marry the simplicity of Tic-Tac-Toe with the personality of Chess. The ceramic final product is delightfully tactile.

A website I coded for a local food business in Rochester, New York.

I worked with a designer to create a light-weight site that contains essential information in an easily digestible (pun intended) format.

Unlike most of my website work, JavaScript is kept to an absolute minimum in favor of static markup so that the site renders blindingly fast.

Despite being perhaps a bit unsettling, these sculptures are based on a fond memory.

Every figure was cast from the same mold, and they may be arranged such that each is sitting on another's lap.