01 · Story and practice
Meet Dominique
See how earlier stories grew into games, accessibility work, and Loptr Lab.
Explore the story →
Independent practice · Loptr Lab
Dominique Devereaux Creative practice as research.
I build games, systems, fictional worlds, and open prototype environments through Loptr Lab. My practice sits at the intersection of organizational leadership, narrative world-building, accessibility, technology, and independent studio production.
I am the Creative Experience Oracle at Loptr Lab. My early stories and distributed narrative experiments became the groundwork for accessible games, creator tools, and connected worlds. Today I document the prototypes and decisions behind them; I am building toward a studio where collaborators can develop these experiences with clear provenance, consent, and access.
People over profit. Accessibility first.
Loptr Lab is a pre-seed, people-over-profit, accessibility-first venture working toward a self-sustaining model within a capitalist economy. Money sustains the work; meaningful change for people is its purpose. We accept funding only on terms that keep people and accessibility first. Our long-term vision includes universal basic income. We aim to bring change to life and leave a transparent record of what we tried, what worked, and what failed so others can carry it forward. This mission governs our projects, funding decisions, and partnerships; it is not a temporary marketing position.
Financial support is optional and sustains infrastructure, maintenance, accessibility work, and documented development. Paying does not buy contributor status, canon authority, approvals, ownership, or employment. Participation and accessibility are not sponsorship rewards. Project-specific licenses and existing signed agreements continue to apply.
Start here
Choose a path through the work.
Meet the person and the studio, try a working experience, or find a way to contribute.
02 · Live browser demo
Try Duet
Experience an accessible game prototype with visual and screen-reader interaction.
Open the demo ↗03 · Contributor pathway
Collaborate
Find the roles, boundaries, and first steps for working with Loptr Lab.
See how to contribute →Creative ecosystem
One body of work, revealed across forms.
Early stories about power, identity, consent, and inherited responsibility developed into Urban Alien Adventures: a distributed narrative method in which advertisements, background media, and apparently separate fragments gradually disclose the players and the world around them.
Those experiments inform the nonlinear archive of Battle the Beast, the inherited investigation of Violet's Revenge, and the original systems design of Veiled Dominion. The map identifies development lineage; it does not collapse every project into one literal continuity or transfer third-party material into original IP.
Discovery pattern
- 01 Encounter fragments.
- 02 Recognize recurring identities and systems.
- 03 Discover who the players are.
- 04 Act inside the revealed architecture.
Purpose & Pathway
Made Sick meets the 1 Billion Mission.
Made Sick · Consent-first creator care
Help people keep creating without asking them to sacrifice their health.
Made Sick is an independent Loptr Lab prototype for creator-owned stories, meaningful milestones, carefully labeled wellness practices, and voluntary participation. PIXIE supports care actions a person chooses for themself, accepts changing capacity, and allows them to pause or leave without penalty.
Research & Practice
Leading the Build
Organizational Leadership and Narrative World-Building in Independent Game Studio Production
Primary research question
How do leadership and production structures in small, founder-led independent game studios shape — and get shaped by — the narrative worlds they build?
The project investigates studio production as a longitudinal creative practice rather than treating a single game as the research object. It asks whether narrative systems, lore, mechanics, shared language, and world-building principles can become part of the organizational infrastructure through which a small studio understands identity, priorities, collaboration, and direction.
Open the full research programme →Practice site
Loptr Lab
The primary longitudinal practice-research environment: an independent studio in which creative, technical, organizational, and accessibility decisions are developed together.
View studio repositories ↗Research logic
Practice → Evidence → Reflection → Analysis → Contribution
Practice Infrastructure
The work is the archive.
These projects are not presented only as finished portfolio pieces. Their repositories, design decisions, documentation, experiments, and production history form an evolving record of practice through which the research questions can be examined.
PRIMARY CREATIVE CASE
Veiled Dominion
Status: design and engine prototype
An open prototype exploring strategic mechanics through restraint, regulation, asymmetric systems, and inclusive architecture. The project provides a site for examining how design principles become technical and organizational constraints.
View engine repository →ACCESSIBILITY ARTIFACT
Duet
Status: live browser demo
An accessibility-first browser prototype designed around screen-reader interaction, coordinate commands, visual testing, procedural audio cues, and a snapshot-oriented interface architecture. It treats accessibility as a systems constraint, not merely a presentation layer.
View prototype → Try the live demo ↗LONGITUDINAL PRACTICE
Returning to the Void
Status: historical project archive
A long-running creative thread extending back to 2016. Its value to the research is longitudinal: it provides a longer trajectory through which founder-led creative practice and production decisions can be considered across changing circumstances.
Explore the project journey →ORGANIZATIONAL EXPERIMENT
Training & Knowledge Transfer
Status: contributor pathway
A contribution pathway that maps prototype engineering, systems design, and technical art onto real project requirements. It provides a practical case for studying onboarding, shared vocabulary, role definition, and knowledge transfer in a small studio.
View training repository →Research Method
A longitudinal practice-research design
01
Practice
Ongoing studio production
02
Archive
Repositories, documents, decisions
03
Reflection
Contemporaneous leadership log
04
Comparison
2–3 independent studios
05
Analysis
Thematic interpretation
Publication Paths
Two projects. Two concrete routes to a platform.
The Halloween target is an internal production milestone. Platform publication remains a separate process with its own technical, rights, account, review, moderation, certification, and business gates.
DUET · HALLOWEEN 2026
Release-worthy → Xbox / Epic
Finish the accessible game, build the evidence package, then choose the platform path: Xbox through ID@Xbox/Partner Center and the GDK/certification pipeline, or PC distribution through an Epic publishing workflow. Halloween proves the product; it does not equal platform approval.
BUILD → PLAYTEST → ACCESSIBILITY → RC → PLATFORM ONBOARDING → CERTIFICATION/REVIEW → RELEASE
REN RHAPSODY · HALLOWEEN 2026
Play submission-ready → Epic
Complete the UEFN island, clear the audio/attribution boundary, playtest, publish a private version, create the Creator Portal release, complete required metadata/IARC steps, and submit for moderation. A later PC/console game adaptation would require a separate platform plan.
UEFN BUILD → PRIVATE VERSION → CREATOR PORTAL → IARC/METADATA → MODERATION → PUBLISHED ISLAND
Employment Evidence
Every repository can become experience — at a different level.
The goal is not to claim that every repository is a shippable commercial game. The goal is to turn real work into documented evidence: what was built, what was tested, what changed, what was learned, and what another person could verify.
| Repository / project | Current viable use | Experience it demonstrates | Next evidence artifact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ren Rhapsody | UEFN portfolio / published-island candidate | Level design, Verse, audio integration, playtesting, publishing workflow, rights awareness | Playable island + code + test report |
| DUET: Solo | Accessible game / hackathon-to-release candidate | Accessibility engineering, web game development, AI integration, Cloud deployment, testing | Release candidate + accessibility case study |
| Veiled Dominion Engine | Game-engine / systems portfolio | C#/.NET architecture, rules systems, testing, game design, accessibility architecture | Vertical slice + automated tests |
| Duet Engine Architecture | Junior-friendly browser systems lab | JavaScript, state machines, accessible interaction, debugging, documentation | Before/after issue + tested mechanic |
| Violet's Revenge | Browser horror prototype / supervised portfolio project | Gameplay prototyping, QA, JavaScript, bot testing, contributor workflow | MVP vertical slice + QA report |
| Paragon Reborn | Pre-production / systems-design portfolio | Technical design, architecture boundaries, Unreal planning, research, documentation | One controllable-hero vertical slice |
| Break the Grid | Playable tabletop / public-interest systems prototype | Rules design, facilitation, accessibility, consent-aware UX, playtest analysis | Facilitated playtest + change log |
| Made Sick | Web/AT Protocol product prototype | OAuth, identity, consent architecture, verification, data provenance, product safety | Acceptance-test matrix + architecture case study |
| PIXIE Holdings | AI/MCP product prototype | Node.js, MCP, AI integration, APIs, data pipelines, secure secret handling | Deployed demo + API test suite |
| Knox Hill / Project NORJAK | Interactive campaign / web-production portfolio | Creative coding, responsive design, interactive storytelling, media integration, launch production | Campaign case study + performance receipts |
| Training | Technical-training / contributor pipeline | Curriculum design, onboarding, accessibility planning, documentation, assessment | One completed learning path + rubric |
| Awesome Open Source Games | Open-source curation / research portfolio | Research, taxonomy, Git/GitHub contribution, editorial maintenance | Curated additions with sourcing notes |
Turn unemployment time into a verifiable work history
For each project, keep a dated trail: issue → implementation → test → review → release/demo → reflection. That produces portfolio evidence for game design, QA, accessibility, frontend/backend development, technical art, product work, research, project coordination, and documentation without claiming employment where there was none.
A résumé can then describe the work accurately as independent project work, open-source contribution, portfolio development, or supervised training—using the repository history as supporting evidence.
Evidence
Public practice archive
STUDIO
Loptr Lab
Ongoing open-source studio repositories and production artifacts.
REFLECTIVE ARCHIVE
PIXIE
Public writing and conceptual exploration surrounding systems, incentives, architecture, and creative practice.
PERSONAL ARCHIVE
GitHub
Personal repositories documenting prototypes, experiments, and creative-technical practice.
Contact
Practice, research, collaboration.
Open to conversations about independent game production, practice research, accessibility, systems architecture, and organizational design.