Game Projects
(2022 - CURRENT)
Alien Boom Boom
(2022)
Multisystem Prototype - Networked Western FPS
Alien Boom Boom Demo
Solo developed Unity C# project. Working towards finishing a small first person game that uses a variety of weapon implementations inspired by my favorite FPS games such as Counter-Strike and Quake. Building out most of the art assets myself to improve my art direction, 3D, painting and animation skillset. I primarily used Blender and Photoshop. Utilizing Unity's NavMesh and NavAgents to aid in my enemy AI behavior. The AI run on an extendable State Machine I wrote. My goals for this project are to release something fully and learn / strengthen new skillsets. I've recently implemented some ragdoll physics into the enemy deaths.
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I have a lot of professional examples below, this is my own prototype within Unity I've been working on while teaching. I am using it as a test bed to implement new systems that I want more experience using. First and foremost I am using Unity's new MLAPI library to network this game. I've used Photon PUN a while back for a personal project, I find the concepts similar. All aspects of the game are being built with networking in mind. Beside the networking I've been working on animation rigging / constraints / IK to be able to set animation targets for holding weapons / items and orienting certain parts of the model separate from it's current animation cycle. I'm also working on my asset creation, I've created the cowboy model as well the stand-in revolver using Blender. I am also honing my design sensibilities by adding visual fx where necessary through particle effects and eventually shaders. I have been reading about and intend on implementing a marching cubes algorithm to deform the terrain once I add a few more weapons and game systems.
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Below you can see an example of my bullet script. This is meant for an actual projectile, not an instant hit-scan type of shot. The bullet Gameobject also contains the sphere mesh, a rigidbody and particle effects.
(2021) A* pathfinding with shortcut heuristics running on Unity jobs / burst compiler
Demonstration of a modified A* algorithm running in jobs / burst compiler for a huge increase in CPU efficiency. Wrote a small batching system to also control how many actually path find at a time, staggering the calls for even more efficiency. Initially followed a tutorial online, but then added the batching, modified the A* to not walk through corners and also added a 'walk directly to' functionality that would take shortcuts in the determined path.
(2019/2020)
Taito's Zeke's Peak
Zeke's Peak is a videogame recreation of a beloved mechanical game of the same name (Also based off of the popular mechanical game Ice Cold Beer).
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I worked as a gameplay programmer, and lead level designer on this project. The goal was to capture the feel of the original mechanical board while developing more many interactive levels for players to explore.
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More videos and screenshots can be seen here.
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(2019/2020)
Logic Puzzle Game / Nanili
I was the lead programmer, a lead level designer and game designer. To make the level design / development easier, and to give some creative control to the players, I also wrote a level editor for the project. I worked with a modeler / animator on this project, however I also helped out with a bit of the animation and most of the scene setup. The game is also setup for multiple languages, as our main audience were residence of Nunavut.
Nanili is a logic based puzzles game where the player must solve the puzzle by queueing up commands that drive the character. The commands include the directions, procedures that can hold a series of directions, and then the loop count that the procedure should run. It introduces players to light programming ideas, while challenging them with fun puzzles.
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The core setup for the command queue system was to set up the logic to build a nice Linked List that stores what type of command / container it is and then links to the previous and next command / or the command that existed within a container.
(2021)
Minotaur vs Theseus
"Among Us-like"
prototype
During the hype of Among Us I wanted to see how fast I could work towards a clone, so I created some art assets and decided to build a small multiplayer experience that was themed around Minotaur vs Theseus. I wanted to make sure there was a really hard fog of war, and also that it was networked. I used Photon PUN to network this experience. Never finished the project, but it was a nice proof of concept for some new systems / ideas I was exploring.
(2018)
AR Experiences / Unibroue
I was a developer on the Unibroue app, I worked on some bugs for some established games already existing on the app as well as took on the lead development of the AR experiences.
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The AR experiences were created with XR kit. I worked as the lead programmer, however I helped with the in-engine animations such as syncing the hands on the guitar to match the music, and the birds flying etc. I used a stencil shader to mask certain areas, specifically noticeable on the second experience where you see an ocean/boat through the beer bottle. The clips shown here are a bit shaky as I didn't have the real beer bottles/labels present for these videos as they are the American versions, which have difference graphics.
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The AR experiences were story boarded for us, we had a little bit of room for creativity.
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Dave Mustaine from Megadeth has a beer named after a song "À TOUT LE MONDE" which we created an AR experience for. He supplied us a new and unheard riff to be played within the experience.
(2021) Typing Fishing Game / Iqalliarluk
This game was created in a few weeks, I worked with a pixel artist to co-design the game and also lead the development. The game helps people learn how to type with the Inuktitut keyboard in both Roman orthographic and Inuktitut syllabics.
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The fish struggles against the fisherman as the fisherman successfully or unsuccessfully types in the prompted words letter by letter. There are multiple difficulties which scale the difficulty by diminishing mistakes allowed to be made, and also idle time allowed.
(2020) Robin Hood RTS / Twin Stick Hybrid Prototype
I had this idea pre pandemic and was working on it quite a bit as a side project. I wanted to make a game where you could control units RTS style but also transition into twin stick controls to micro manage or use single characters. I programmed both styles of controls to work on the characters. The characters themselves were actually just a single character that had interchangeable features. And of course as everyone does, I got ambitious and wanted to network it as well. I looked at Mirror, Unity networking API and Photon PUN and ended up using Photon PUN.
This is also where I got the idea to start looking into optimizing pathfinding, which became the A* pathfinding project seen above.
(2014-2017)
Old Prototypes
Academic & Personal
The Red/Blue retro looking co-op multiplayer game won 1st place at the first ever Sudbury Game Design Competition (later known as Northern Game Design Competition). There were over a dozen teams of up to 4 members each competing. The following year I won second place with the snowman game, art supplied by my brother that year. I ended up being asked to judge the competition on the 3rd year. There are a lot of other early prototypes in the video from my time in university.
(2017) Dynamic Difficulty Scaling Undergraduate
Thesis & Project
For my final year of my undergraduate I opted to write a thesis on difficulty scaling of a game based off of an expert system AI. I wanted to see if a system like this could rely on simple metrics to run it, and also to prove that one could use a system like this to try and time gameplay to a) keep users in flow state and b) provide users with a similar story pace, so as not to have a player progress too quickly, or a player to fall behind and lose interest in the story.
For this study I wrote a small twin stick dungeon crawler as a testbed for the difficulty scaling. Since then, two different masters students have repurposed the project for their own thesis' and one college group is currently (2022) using it as a testbed for a smart controller they are developing.
I tested the system against users and had some really interesting results. Gamers that claimed to be great at games, and non-gamers alike were able to finish the set number of checkpoints within similar time spans because of the auto scaling of difficulty. You can read more in the actual paper.
Twitter
Game Art / Dev
Check out my Twitter to see my journey in 2D and 3D game art creation. I always like working on side projects and rounding out my skills in all aspects of game dev, not just programming.
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