OUR STORY
Dumpster Baby is the result of a senior capstone for our Games + Simulations major while attending Miami University. The capstone consists of three classes totaling 12 credit hours, one class taken each of my last three semesters before graduation. The first class during the spring 2024 semester began with ideating and pitching a totally brand new game idea. With Angel Hardy's pitch for a game touching on the subjects of queer homelessness we formed the group that is our dev team. The final project of our spring 2024 semester culminated in producing a vertical slice which was showcased at our department’s end of year expo. The second class during the fall of 2025 consisted of the bulk of the game’s production, with the midterm project being an alpha build, and final project a beta build. The midterm alpha build was also shown off and playable to attendees of GDEX 2024 at the Miami University booth. Now in our final class before our team graduates we focus on polishing, marketing, and publishing the fully finished game.
The game is built in Unity featuring an isometric camera view as players explore and meet NPCs to befriend while they learn their story. The player helps them out with various tasks as they get to know them better before asking two of them to be roommates. The game is made with a focus on its aesthetics and narrative, driving home an uplifting message to players that community is an incredible force of good.
The dev team consists of Angel Hardy as team lead and artist, Leah Stewart as artist, Tommy Bozzelli as designer and producer, and Josef Arnold and Sam Bowsher as programmers. The game also features Sophie Arcusa as composer.
Meet the Team
Team Lead, Artist
Angel Hardy
Angel Hardy is a technical artist and team lead on Dumpster Baby. He loves queer stories and vampires, and works with interactive art.
Artist
Leah Stewart
Leah Stewart is a 3D artist who models environments, plants and animals! She’s a beginner animator and enjoys games with unique environments and stories; her passion is to work in the entertainment industry in modeling, prop creation or animation.
Designer & Producer
Tommy Bozzelli
Tommy Bozzelli is a game designer and writer. Across video games and tabletop games he has a great passion for systems and mechanics, particularly how they can tie in with narrative. In addition to games he loves cooking, movies/tv, and analyzing media. He aims to work in the tabletop games industry producing board games and ttrpg experiences, while critiquing and reviewing games on the side. You can find more of his work on his portfolio website below:
Programmer
Sam Bowsher
Sam Bowsher is a programmer first and foremost, and a comedian mostly incidentally. She loves languages, wordplay, coding, and just about any creative medium. Especially video games, it would be a little weird to be working on this project if she didn’t like those.
Programmer
Josef Arnold
Josef Arnold is a clown in a state between existence and nonexistence that escaped from the circus with four different monkeys hitching a ride in his brain and refusing to leave. He then went on to discover the existence of computers and became a programmer for games with a dash of story writing, 3D rigging, animating, and modeling as dictated by the contract he made with the demon who released him unto the world. He likes video games, webcomics, just about any fictional media that he can have fun with, programming, animating, good stories, and the rare moments where the four monkeys in his brain decide to cooperate with him.
