In-progress and Completed Game Projects
Projects in Progress
Mine Escape
Mine Escape is a collaboratively-made puzzle game that puts players in the shoes of a rescue worker, exploring a collapsed mine to find and free trapped miners. The player wanders through four floors, collecting tools, equipment and keycards to bypass obstacles, rescue missing mine workers, and get them to the mine’s central elevator for extraction from the mine.
My contributions to this project were largely centered around programming gameplay systems, developer tools, and backend systems such as the save system. I also contributed to level design, environment art, and overall design of the game’s core concepts.
Fungaland
Fungaland is the capstone project of my friend and teammate, Gabbi Clipfell. Gabbi recruited me and two others to work together on the project, which we developed over the course of roughly six months starting in late 2021 and ending in May of 2022. The end result is a short RPG experience in which the player takes on the role of Shroomy, a mushroom man who works as a craftsman and has the responsibility of saving his village from an invasion of hostile locusts.
This was my first project in Unreal 4, which required me to learn and then implement systems using Unreal’s blueprints and AI technology. I also leveraged my 3D modelling skills and a bit of rigging and animation ability to create the locust enemies the player encounters in the game. This project was an excellent opportunity for me to not only learn Unreal and some of its included technologies, but to demonstrate how transferrable my existing design and development skills in Unity were.
While Fungaland is functionally complete, we are in the process of implementing some feedback from Gabbi’s professors and polishing some artistic and mechanical details so we can fully ship the project.
Completed Projects
Escape of Happiness
Escape of Happiness is a 2D horror sci-fi game created by myself and my fellow students in the IDEEA program at the University of Washington Bothell. After an earlier, smaller team building project, we worked over the course of roughly six months to create this game from scratch. The game is a procedurally generated, roguelite experience in which the player navigates a randomly generated map and faces off against increasingly difficult enemies as they try to escape a nightmarish, derelict space station. With each failure, the player returns to a hub room where they’re able to spend tokens they’ve discovered during their exploration to upgrade their character’s stats.
On this project, I served as the team’s producer, leading weekly meetings, delegating tasks for my teammates, and keeping our supervisors appraised of our progress. I also worked as a systems and gameplay engineer, with my predominant focus on the generation and preservation of necessary map data. I built the system responsible for random map generation and developed the necessary code to save relevant information while the player remained on a given floor.
Monster Jam
Monster Jam was a group project for the UWB Summer Game Jam in 2020. Over the course of a weekend, I and a group of three other people built a game themed around a collection of small, helpful monsters which enable players to work their way through a series of varied environments.
My contributions to this project included gameplay and systems programming, providing input on UI design, and helping to establish level designs. This project gave me valuable insight into what a team could accomplish when it had a variety of skillsets, including programming, 3D art, and sound design.
Bubble Shield
Bubble Shield was developed in 2017. It is a first-person puzzle-platformer, centered around the mechanic of using user-manipulated energy bubbles to circumvent obstacles and complete levels.
I did all of the programming, design, and artwork for Bubble Shield. The size and complexity of the project was particularly valuable in influencing my approach to designing and developing projects in both my game development and programming work going forward. The most important lesson was the need to adequately separate tasks into different classes when appropriate.
The Balance Experiment
My first completed game, The Balance Experiment, is a short FPS I started in 2016. The project began as a broad experiment with different sorts of mechanics, until it was trimmed down to the short experience you see here.
All programming, design, and artwork were done by me. The project involved a lot of design reworks and overhauls until I refined it down to this end result. It provided valuable insights into the importance of appropriately scoping and designing projects at the beginning of the development process.