Backyard Snowdown was produced by "Frankenfruit Studio". Our game was the product of my 2017 end of year team game assignment. Frankenfruit Studio consisted of 2 designers,
2 programmers, and 3 artists.
We created a kid's imagination of a backyard winter snow fight! A fast-paced local multiplayer party game!
The last kid standing wins.
Backyard Snowdown's development spanned over 2 months. Early on, both our designers were absent for around 4 weeks, due to this our other programmer and I took it upon ourselves to design the game. We ended up having a really great response from the teachers and other students. This taught us to be flexible and innovative when it came to thinking on our feet. As a part of the assessment, our teachers organized an industry panel, whose job was to come in and provide feedback on the various games. What surpised us, when it came to our turn to present, was that the panel, during the question period, had no advice for us. (Every other group had advice given). This gave our team a huge boost in morale because it showed us that we had been developing the game to a high standard.
Real World Racer (RWR) is a game that was created for my end-of-year team game project for my second year of my AIE games programming course.
In RWR you can explore the globe and create race tracks anywhere. Beat your best track times and challange your friends!
Development spanned over 6 months, June to November (in 2018). In this time our team developed the game, maintained documentation, performed testing, implemented changes and produced marketing material.
Initially we wanted to utilise Mapbox (3rd party addon for getting map data), and Photon (3rd party addon for multiplayer game capability) to create an experience for players to play together anywhere in the world. Our teachers advised us at our first review that the scope may be too large. We discussed this as a team and decided to make drastic changes. Instead of live multiplayer action, we would focus on getting Mapbox working well to allow players to create their own maps, set their best track times, and challenge their friends instead.
This ended up being a better scope as coordinating Mapbox and Photon was proving too tough for 3 programmers.
In mid 2019 I got the sudden urge to make something cool in Unity. I had recently watched this video and decided to create it in Unity. I had a lot of fun creating it and thought "this would be cool to release on Steam", so I checked and no one had done it yet (please don't beat me to it)!
Here's the description Wikipedia provides:
"Langton's ant is a two-dimensional universal Turing machine with a very simple set of rules but complex emergent behaviour. It was invented by Chris Langton in 1986 and runs on a square lattice of black and white cells. The universality of Langton's ant was proven in 2000."
Initially I just wanted to get the maths of Langton's Ant working in Unity, so I started with initialising cubes and using raycasts from a player gameobject to get it working. After a little while, I got it working, but the number of cubes being created was silly and Unity wasn't handling it well. Next, I set out to optimize my code. I learned a ton of cool Unity optimisations such as disabling physics engine and learning more about raycasts amongst other things. In the end the biggest optimization by far was changing from creating cubes to simply having a texture whose pixels I was changing based on some complexish maths.
Six Million Dollar Vigilante Reloaded was created during a game jam at AIE. This was a three day game jam.
The game is about a robot in the "old west" shooting bad guys and reaching the boss and to defeat him.
Back in May-June 2018 we studied the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) using AIE's bootstrap as the base of the engine. We are programming the rendering capabilities of the engine. In my engine I have included 5 multi-textured models (4 of which are loaded from an obj and an accompanying mtl file), a custom phong lighting shader which lights each model, a particle system shader and a shader that handles the blended floor texture.
One of the many subjects we covered in 2017, during my course, was "steering behaviours", we learned about various behaviours such as: seek, flee, wander, flocking.
A little while ago, a friend and I wanted to create a game together in Unity. We brainstormed and settled on a rage inducing game format as it is quite engaging.
We learned lots about aspects of design and also that it is important to not get too attached to features if they are not working.
We plan to release it for free on the Play store and on Steam.
In the game "Your Gallary" you select photos that represent "What home means to you" to decorate a modern art gallery. Click the photos to find one you like.
The game was developed over a three day span for the theme "What home means to you". It was developed alongside Nathan Nette using Unity 3D and Blender 3D. It was good to learn how to do different things in Unity, particularly how to have it so players can import their own photos into the game, atleast on the desktop version which is avaliable for download here.