Games and Experiments
Here’s a quick list of experiments and games that I’ve worked on. Check back every so often as I’ll be continuing to add to and improve this list whenever I get the opportunity.
Squeakret Mission (play online at itch.io)
Made for Meta Game Jam 2018, this game came at a time where I was suffering from a massive workload and the 2 week time period quickly became a few days. A very ambitious game, it was originally intended have a big community focus, drawing content from the other games made for the jam. All you can do in this version is explore the game pages as I ran out of time, however, while this failed as a game I consider it a technical success. The backend server system works really well and in future I should be able to create games with interesting multiplayer functions much easier.
Game of Drones (download)
A game made for the 2018 Global Game Jam, the game involves the player manageing a team of drones that need to be daisy chained to create a connection to the goal. Despite starting with a great deal of enthusiasm, technical issues ate up a lot of our time and we had issues integrating code and art. However, it was a great learning experience and I’m greateful to have taken part in the event.
JAWS (repo)
A framework I created to help me make quick websites, the Jekyll, AJAX Webpack Scaffold (get it). Though honestly, I’m thinking about trying Hugo…
Where Do Birds Go When It Rains? (play online at itch.io)
The winner of the visuals prize for the 2017 XKCD Game Jam, this game was an enormous success for me. Based off XKCD #1434, the main character is a bird that is trying to find somewhere to hide from the rain. I’m very proud of both the 2.5D flight mechanics and the minimalist art style, which I created almost all of the art and animations for. It got excellent scores, and was my first proper solo game jam! I’m very proud of the style and atmosphere of this game and would love to come around and make it a full game.
Sheeple (not available)
A small game a friend and I made while waiting between game jams. You control a small team of sheeple who convert other sheeple to their colour (and therefore team) with paintball guns! It uses a boids sim that I intend to refactor at some point after which I’ll probably publish it somewhere.
MonstroCity: Kaiju at 6 O’Clock! (itch.io download)
This game was created for #Kiwijam17 by Traffic Jam Games, a team organised just for this jam by a group of guys including myself. The game is a city builder where you attempt to build a defense against a giant Kaiju who comes out of the water every night. This time we had several artists and a sound guy but we still had issues with organisation since the team was so large; 9 people ended up working on the project. At the end of the jam we had several merge conflicts that caused problems showing the game, but all in all it was a great experience. I’d like to polish the game a bit more at some stage.
Geocaching Game Plugin for Unity on Android (repo)
The Geocaching Game Plugin for Unity on Android is a project I developed because I wanted to learn how to work more with Android and Unity together. I also wasn’t very happy with Pokémon Go and I felt I could a better job. It uses a background service to gather GPS data and send it to Unity, even when the screen is off! It also uses MapzenGo for the map rendering. If you want to try out an actual build you can download one here.
Werewolf to Find (itch.io download)
Werewolf to Find is a game that I made along with a group of guys for #Kiwijam16. It’s about keeping a bunch of people alive in a castle, some of whom are werewolves trying to sabotage you! At night the wolves come out and you have to fight them off. However, it wasn’t able to be fully complete. It was a great learning experience but also very stressful because I was both a programmer and the sole artist. Work on it has stopped due to other commitments. It uses code from both my Oblique Orthographic Prototype and my 2D Customizable Character Animation Test.
Oblique Orthographic Prototype (WebGL)
This prototype project was created for Werewolf to Find to test the viability of using full 3D motion instead of 2D side-scrolling. It uses an oblique orthographic projection which allows us to reuse our current art assets and style which is pretty cool! I’m considering making it open source with an accompanying blog post so I can explain how I achieved parts of it.
2D Customizable Character Animation Test (WebGL)
This test was developed to find a good way of using customizable 2D sprites with animation in Unity. It supports sprite swapping through paper-dolling, palette swapping, normal mapped lighting and more. This test scenario is unfortunately quite limited because I can’t be bothered making more sprites (I am not a particularly good artist). I think I might expand this into a real plugin later.
2D Networked Physics (Windows download)
This used to be the core of a game that I’m still working on. I was designing it from the ground up be multiplayer and while I still intend the game to feature online multiplayer it was far too much work to continue using this code. I’ve since restarted the project with a brand new codebase. This was my first proper attempt at a networked game and contains a custom physics system, latency compensation, a very basic AI behaviour tree and an A*/Jump Point Search hybrid pathfinding system that was a bit of a failure in code but a success as a learning experience.