Maker & Experience Architect

Stephen Ng

Featured Builds

A hooded player holding a conch shell to their ear at the song-snippet music-puzzle device, beside a large feathered creature puppet at Adventure Camp.

Photo: Justin Oliphant

Adventure Camp

A three-day immersive gathering in the Mendocino redwoods, staged by The Explorers Guild — puppets, puzzles, and songs sending teams of five on a hero’s journey to protect a world of magical creatures. Built by a small core team I was part of, from concept through production. Winner of No Proscenium’s Best Show of 2025.

A player inside “Kazoogenheim,” a parody art gallery in the Solano Human Project, its walls hung with kazoo-themed riffs on famous artworks.

Photo: Mayu Shimizu

The Solano Human Project

A self-authored public ARG staged across several blocks of Solano Avenue in Albany, CA — a hybrid of street quest, escape room, and puzzle hunt where teams thwart a rogue AI through SMS facilitation, dead drops, and puzzles hidden in real storefronts. Reviewed by Room Escape Artist, and nominated for a TERPECA award and a No Proscenium Audience Award (an “Immie”).

Merch →

Visitors gathered around a table with seed cylinders and puzzle booklets inside the Conservatory of Flowers greenhouse during History in Bloom.

Photo: Alain McLaughlin/KQED

History in Bloom

A commissioned, ticketed location-based immersive experience for the Conservatory of Flowers and KQED, built with a four-person team under Urban Replay. Blends archival research and historical timelines with physical puzzle mechanics for a seamless, self-guided narrative hunt.

A costumed player spelling HEARTS on illuminated LEXACUBE letter cubes at Neotropolis, beside a live word-scoring display.

LEXACUBE

A custom-engineered word game of six smart cubes (up to twelve in two-player mode), using unipolar analog Hall effect sensors and neodymium magnets for error-tolerant grid identification. Winner of an Editors’ Choice award at Bay Area Maker Faire 2025, and played at Burning Man, unSCruz, Neotropolis (shown here), and El Cerrito Preschool Cooperative’s “ECPC After Dark” fundraiser.

Play the browser version →

Players gathered around a large table knocking wooden stations linked by an LED-lit chase strip, playing Knock Band at the SF Pursuit scavenger hunt.

Eine Kleine Knock Music

A multiplayer rhythm game: players knock in time with a 300-LED chase strip that streams the beat down a line of stations. Custom-encoded songs scatter beats across the stations for coordinated call-and-response, scored on timing accuracy — all driven by a Raspberry Pi and piezo-sensing ESP32 nodes on an RS-485 bus. Shown here in play at the SF Pursuit scavenger hunt, where over 800 people played it across a single weekend.

Play the browser version → “pursuit”

A large-format LED word-game display on a Burning Man art car showing a Wordle-style board, with a crowd gathered around at night.

Large-Format LED Display

A large-format LED matrix display I designed and built, mounted on a Burning Man art car — shown here running a Wordle-style word game for the crowd, and also the canvas for LEXACUBE and other word games on the playa.

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