Designer, Advocate, Educator
psychhound.itch.io
Luka Brave
Psychhound games
game designer, advocate, educator. game studies master’s graduate Focusing on therapeutic play, experience exploration, and community building.
25+ games published since 2022
Psychhound Games started publishing in December of 2022, and has since published over 25 TTRPGs, including solo, duet, and multiplayer games that range from family-friendly mischief to gut-punching character exploration. Luka’s favorite games are the ones that encourage you to play characters on the border between incredibly endearing and “guys who suck pretty bad.”
When designing games, Luka likes to push the boundaries of mechanics. Some of his TTRPGs are built on other’s systems, but most are original – including his original Horseshoe System, designed for twisty-turny oneshots. Mechanics Luka has built off of include Spotify playlists, the weather, and even the Tumblr bot infestation.
Luka’s ultimate goal is to build a collection of games that can act therapeutically – aiding with mental health, disability, and therapy needs. His first foray into this was With Breath & Sword, a solo journaling game that uses grounding methods and breathing techniques as the oracle to slay or tame a monster, which had a successful Kickstarter run in January of 2024 and is up for nomination for the CRiT Awards Best Solo Game of the Year. He has more games in this vein in the works, including a solo game to help cope with PTSD and a larger multiplayer game that helps players heal from trauma as it’s played. This multiplayer game, called Spiritkeep, is the subject of his master’s thesis.
You can read more about Spiritkeep here.
Click HERE to check out Luka’s blog posts, including various TTRPG accessibility projects.
Up and coming academic
Graduate Student
M.A. Graduate
-Rhetoric & Writing studies
-Game Studies focus
-Learning & motivation cert
Luka earned their Master’s at Oklahoma State University, studying under the direction of Dr. An Cheng. In May of 2025, he successfully defended his thesis, “Designing Spiritkeep: A new text to harness the emotional benefits of the therapeutically applied role-playing game genre.”
Research
Luka’s research focus is applied gaming, mainly therapeutically applied roleplaying games and games for educational purposes. He combines 10 years of disability advocacy, 3 years of social work, and 8 years as a TTRPG player and GM to explore how roleplaying games can be used for education, emotional growth, and mental well being.
Specific research includes:
- TTRPG players’ development of emotional resilience after long-term tabletop roleplay
- Using self-determination in disability studies as a model for composition classrooms
- A new card game to engage writing students during essay revision
It’s dangerous to go alone …
If you’re looking for more information, check out:
making learning playful
Instructor of Record
- Composition I (3 sections)
- Advanced Composition: Interactive Text and Multimodality (1 section)
Playful Learning
As an instructor, Luka’s key tenants in the classroom are playful learning, student agency, and democratized discussion. Luka has successfully used games in the classroom to help students learn key concepts, engage actively with the material, and bond as a class.
As an assistant director in OSU’s Writing Center, Luka developed a new game called Essays 2 Essays that gets students excited about close reading, editing, and peer reviewing essays. The game is currently in development for publication.
Luka draws from the scholarship of instructors such as Asao Inoue, Marilla Svinicki, Stephen Brookfield, Peter Elbow, and others when designing courses and content. Luka uses choices between assignments and multimodal work to put more power into students’ hands.
Publications
Brave, Luka. “Roll an Essay Check: Gaming in the Classroom.” Good Things for Us to Read, edited by Joshua Daniel, OSU Libraries, 2024, pp. 56-65. https://open.library.okstate.edu/goodthingstoread/chapter/roll-an-essay-check-gaming-in-the-classroom/.
Brave, Luka. “Play as Learning: TTRPGs in the Classroom.” Rascal News, 7 Nov. 2024, https://www.rascal.news/play-as-learning-ttrpgs-in-the-classroom/.
Brave, Luka. “Designing Spiritkeep: A New Text to Harness the Emotional Benefits of the Therapeutically Applied RPG Genre.” Oklahoma State University ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2025, https://www.proquest.com/docview/3251554766
Upcoming Publications
Brave, Luka. “An Exploration of Emotional Resilience Developed Through Tabletop Role-Play.” The International Journal of Role-Playing. 2025.
Presentations
“A Choose-Your-Own-Experience Game: Accessibility in the Writing Center,” Southern Plains Conference. 2024.
“Healing Through Play: Using Tabletop Roleplay to Develop Emotional Resilience,” Southern Plains Conference. 2025.
“Essays 2 Essays: A Gameful Approach to Composition Instruction,” Leveling Up the Classroom Conference. 2025.
Get in contact
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Contact Me
luka@psychhound.com
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