01 | Overview

Open Up Shop!

You are a fish with dreams. Chase them!
Welcome to Upstream, a vibrant underwater world where players, as fish, chase their most whimsical entrepreneurial dreams. However, only one fish can open a shop in the bustling fish market.
To prove you’re ready, you’ll need to successfully apprentice at three shops to launch your very own business.

Upstream is a hybrid board-and-app game started from a broad prompt,"design of play spaces," evolving into a polished MVP pairing modular wooden boards, CAD-sculpted fish pieces, and 12 custom digital minigames.

Author’s note: This game is insanely fun >:) Feel free to play on your own via the report’s print + play!

Role

Game Designer
App Developer
Physical Fabricator

Timeline

10 weeks

Tools

Figma, Fusion360, Nomad Sculpt, Laser Cutter, 3D Printer, React Native, Supabase

Skills

Game development
Physical fabrication
Digital Fabrication

My Impact

  • Solo-built all physical components of Upstream: Wooden boards & tokens, sculpting + printing player pieces, box.

  • Created half of the digital components: 6 custom shop minigames (Boutique, Museum, Stationary Store, Hair Salon, Hat Shop, Pub) + their digital assets
    *Awesome co-developer Monica Hicks built the second half

  • Ideation, Mechanic Development, Play-Testing.

  • Asset art editing + Token art
    *Board + box art by teammates Dahlynn, Monica, Ilaria

02| TL;DR

The Challenge

Context

The prompt was open-ended:

Design a game that toys
with the concept of space.

Gap

Narrative games lacked
tactile grounding. Escape
rooms lacked replayability.

We wanted a game where
every session felt new & players built the world as they played.

Goals

  • Evoke delight, strategy,
    and friendly competition

  • Make every game
    session different.

  • Polish + FUN!!

Players receive an ambiguous word hinting the 3 shops they must apprentice at, racing to check out before anyone else.
‍ ‍
The board grows as the fish market is explored, with players continuously adding new shops to the game space.
Each shop has a space which triggers a minigame on the companion app, themed to that shopkeeper's personality + store.

  • Expand the board — place new shops in the fish market you as hit the borders, reshaping the map in real time

  • Apprentice at shops — play themed digital minigames to earn tokens toward your prompt.
    Winning = apprenticeship completed, token earned!

  • Race to check out — deduce which 3 specificshops you need a token from, block your rivals, and return to the start first to win!

The Solution

A hybrid board game with an expandable game space,
secret prompt, and themed digital minigames —
all wrapped in an immersive narrative

Report
Github

All minigames introduce
the shopkeeper…

… a themed game…

…and win/loss
conditions!

03| Our Process

Overview

Ideate

  • Diverge → converge brainstorming

  • Narrative, mechanics, and spatial layouts explored in parallel

  • Landed on fish market + expandable board

Research

  • Played + studied tons of games: Lasers and Feelings, Wordle, Club: Paradox, etc.

  • Readings: What is a Puzzle?, Designing the Puzzle, Alan Cheng on randomness

  • Defined emotional north star: delight, strategy, competition

Prototype

  • Paper grids → themed cardstock tiles → laser-cut boards

  • Mobile app built shop by shop

  • 3D-sculpted player pieces

Iterate

  • 8 playtests, 7 full iterations

  • Sessions with close, medium, and loose ties

  • Rules, minigames, and movement rewritten repeatedly