Rob Jagnow, Project Portfolio

Uncrossy

I love games where the rules can be understood in seconds but the emergent gameplay leads to a huge variety of puzzles with wide difficulty range. I got an idea for a new word game in my head and felt compelled to build it. The result: Uncrossy.

Early testers loved it, so on September 6, 2025, I launched it with daily puzzles, all designed by me. Play it now for free!

The game engine is realtively straightforward. The real trick is how to design a great puzzle. For that, I've built some clever tools and have a lot of tricks up my sleeve.

Game development Javascript

AI Resume

I've been looking to get deeper into applied AI, so I built a virtual self who can answer questions about my resume.

My goal is to see if a 3D avatar adds value as the face and voice of an AI agent. I also wanted to get a sense of API maturity and gaps. The project weaves together many tools — ChatGPT as the agent, ElevenLabs for voice cloning and text-to-speech, Character Creator 4 for the avatar, Unity to drive the WebGL animation system, and Python libraries to convert text to visemes for animation.

Go ahead and ask virtual Rob some questions at ai.robjagnow.com or visit my more traditional resume, which is also a playable game.

Applied AI Text-to-speech Python Javascript Unity Animation

Cogs

Originally launched in 2009 with a fully bespoke C++ engine, I spent some time in 2025 porting this award-winning game to Unity so that I could re-launch it on many platforms with modern foundations.

Visit the Cogs website to purchase for iOS, Android, PC, Mac, or Linux.

Unity C# Game Design UX

Vizpipe

Over the years, I've independently built several interactive visualizations for the Web, some of which are linked to below. This got me thinking about entirely new abstractions that we might be able to use to think about data at a higher level that lets us step away from columns and rows and reason instead about keys and connections. With this in mind, I built Vizpipe, a concept to evolve our relationship with data. It's about making data viz accessible, interactive, editable, and auditable.

You can learn more about this new dataviz abstraction in this video.

Data Visualization UX JavaScript

Stack

QuaranTeam, described below, proved to be a fabulous team-builting game for remote teams, but it suffered from needing exactly six players. To make a more casual, zen game that teams of any size can play over Zoom — say, while waiting for a meeting to start — I built Stack.

Stack is a simple block-stacking game where players take turns putting pieces on a small island until the whole stack topples over. You get a point for every piece you place and lose points if you knock over the stack.

Multi-player physics games can be tricky to build because realistic physics requires low latency. I solved this by handing ownership of the full physics simulation from one player to the next as players take turns stacking blocks.

Stack is free to play right now! Try it with your team on your next video call.

Game Design Community Building Unity WebGL

QuaranTeam

At the start of the pandemic, my team at Google was hiring new employees but we had no options for fun team-building experiences. With that in mind, I built QuaranTeam, a six-player collaborative game where players work together to solve 15 puzzles of increasing difficulty. It's designed to be played with all players connected on a video call with the game in the browser.

Spoiler alert: One secret of the game, usually figured out pretty quickly, is that each player will see slightly a slightly different view of each puzzle. Everyone will need to speak up and communicate clearly to make it to the end.

This game is free for any team!

Game Design Community Building Unity WebGL

Extrasolar

While I was running Lazy 8 Studios, the most ambitious project that my team launched was Extrasolar, an award-winning, genre-defying game that could be played over the Web on desktop or mobile. It was a play-at-your-own-pace, single-player Alternate Reality Game (ARG) with a 30-day story that played out through cloud-rendered images, websites, PDF files, terminal systems, newspaper clippings, and live action video.

Brought to life by a team of 40, Extrasolar found a hard-core fan base but never achieved commercial success. You can visit the old website to see an archive of what this groundbreaking game delivered when it was still running.

For more about the design process of this unique game, you can view my talks Game Design at 0.0003 FPS and Innovating by Breaking the Rules.

Alternate Reality Game Python JavaScript Game Design Experimental Gameplay

Words Have Weight

Following the death of George Floyd and so many similar deaths of young black men at the hands of the police, the situation felt hopeless. As a response, I created the short interactive experiment Words Have Weight as an attempt to convey that even when all feels lost, the last words of these young men and women have resonated in a way that I hope can still bring change. A warning: This is a very dark, sad experience. It's not for everyone.

Part of the goal was also to create something powerful that can be experienced on any platform and takes less than 2 minutes to play.

Game Design Queer Games JavaScript

Covid Daily Digest

During the pandemic, I became frustrated in how websites and news organizations conveyed the risk of Covid. Covid Daily Digest, while no longer updated, shows experiments in how we might do a better job of communicating the risk of daily activities during a pandemic.

As an example, I have a visualization that shows how many people would need to be in a space in order to have a 50% chance that at least one is currently contagious.

Science Communication Data Science JavaScript UX

The Politics of Covid

In the early days of the pandemic, just as masking and vaccination protocols were starting to turn into a political topic, I saw patterns of short-sighted decisions made on a state-by-state basis. To analyze how this was affecting community health, I built The Politics of Covid as a way to visualize correlations between politics, health policy, and health outcomes.

Visualization JavaScript UX Politics

50 Lessons from AR/VR Prototypes

While I was at Google, I led a small prototyping team through the creation of more than 100 prototypes to build up a foundational understanding of VR and AR best practices. In this rapid-fire talk at VRDC 2017, I cover 50 lessons that my team learned from our experiments.

Even though this talk was some time ago, these lessons continue to be just as relevant today.

AR VR Prototyping UX Unity