Button Masher
Button masher was a game I developed for an alternate controller class in year three at Sheridan college. The unique aspect of the project came from working with an arduino inside of unity. The game focuses on pressing the correct button based on a set of lights and arrows displayed on a screen. The project gave me the chance to brush off my circuit board skills from grade 11 computer engineering. It was fun working on a bread board and learning how unity and arduino interact with each other.
2D procedural generation done in Unity.
Dwindle
Dwindle was a school project from third year. My role was team lead and programmer on the team. The production was split into two different sections. The first semester (September 2021 - December 2021) was the pre-production phase where the team of four conceived and planned the game. We had a chance to pitch out game through a presentation, create team charters, GDD, TDD, beat maps and creating a schedule for the upcoming semester. Dwindle itself is a bullet hell inspired survival game focusing on a robot dodging a post apocalyptic world ruined by climate change and its effects.
Dwindle has made me realize the amount of communication and momentum that must be kept in order to fully realize a game. Another game that I was working on fell apart due to lack of team communication This was despite having a fully fleshed out game concept. To avoid this problem on Dwindle, I made sure we had weekly meetings during pre-production. Still, towards the final week we missed 2 of our meetings and stopped communicating on Discord. This reminded me of the previous game team failure. When we were all in class together, I pushed the team to keep our meetings and focus. We did a self-reflection and agreed that our game would take the most amount of work out of any of the other games, but also that we really like the direction. As team lead I had to make sure that we were having the team meetings. We stuck to our meeting schedule going into our winter break and ended up ahead of our schedule, giving us more time for playtesting.
During the last portions of the semester we realized during our second to last play testing session that we were not getting our point across. We wanted to send a message about climate change and the game about a hunter and child was not getting the point across. So we redesigned it into what it is today which is about a robot in a post apocalyptic world affected by the disasters of climate change. The redesign was done in the last 3 weeks of school so we had limited time to create a new design.
Right now Dwindle is playable on itch!
Tethered
Tethered was created for the GMTK Game Jam 2021. The theme was “Joined Together” with only 48 hours to complete the game. In Tethered you connect blocks to form a chain. When you are connected to these blocks your ability to move and tether to other blocks transfers to the block you just tethered to. Your goal is to reach the end goal and move on to the next level. I handled everything in the game within 48 hours, including the code and art. I used a font I found online and the music was done by Scott Parker.
During the jam I ended up having to build a bunkie. This took time away from game development and sabotaged my original design idea. It was a learning experience as I learned to re-evaluate my original design and ask people for help where I needed it. I scaled back to just 6 levels. I was originally going to add additional mechanics like teleportation pads that only work for blocks, but had to scale down. I also asked my friend for help with the music because I knew it would give more personality to the game. Through Tethered, I learned how to scale back an idea without losing what makes the idea unique.
Steps
Steps was a school assignment in which we were tasked with making a portal 2 level around the concept of teach, test then challenge. I choose to focus on lasers for my puzzle but the end result did not end up how I wanted. The level started off being way too hard. In order to get the level to be the best level it could be I went through multiple play tests with my friends, asking questions and responding to their feedback. It was hard to hear some of the feedback, but I incorporated it into my level design. The end result was a vast improvement in the level. I learned the importance of responding and analyzing feedback in order to create a better level.
Cat Detective
Cat Detective was made in my first year of Game Design for a narrative class. The project’s main focus was the narrative aspect. The assignment specified that the game must have multiple endings with a dialog tree. I decided to take on the assignment with unity. In order to speed up implementation, I created a custom dialog system for my game.
Stuck In Space
Stuck In Space was a game jam game created for the 2021 Zero Hour game jam. This was a jam talking place during daylight savings where the clocks reset an hour so it is like the game was made in zero hours. The theme was “Gravity”. To reflect that theme, I made the main mechanic centre around your control over gravity. You can shoot to determine which objects follow your gravity. Even though it was only made in an hour, making a game in such a short amount of time was a fun experience.
A Chase Through Time
A chase through time was made for the 2020 Brackies game jam. It is a top down shooter made in about a week. Although the game is quite simple I took a lot away from this game. The main takeaway was regarding overwork. We had a big scope at the beginning of the jam. We laid out a schedule and milestones of when things would be. The one thing we missed was breaks. For the first 3 days we put in around 9-12 hours into the game without stopping but, as soon as the 4th day hit we were burnt out. We pivoted to get something submittable, but it ended up being much less then we had hoped. It was a ton of fun and my actual first experience with working with people on a game. I learned a lot about collaboration and team tooling like Github and Trello, but the main learning was about sustainable pace.