Projects

Screenshots and video are WIP, but trust me, it’s really good!

At the time of this prototype, I had recently beaten Outer Wilds and was in one of my RimWorld phases. This prototype was essentially to see if I could build the bones of a RimWorld-like game, but across multiple small planets over which you could fully pan your camera.

In this prototype, I was able to spawn celestial bodies and have them orbit. The actual physics of planet velocity, mass and gravitional pull were simulated, but if I were to continue this game, I’d probably just give them an arbitrary ellpitcal orbit. I don’t know how they figured it out back in the day, keeping orbiting planets from crashing into each other or flying off into space isn’t easy!

There wasn’t much in the way of gameplay in the prototype, but I had reached a point where I had a working coordinate system for procedurally generated planets, could place entities on them, and could have them move on the surface. This laid the groundwork for me to allow the designation of building orders on the surface, but I’d moved onto another prototype before quite finishing that up.

This prototype was inspired by God Hand for the PS2, a game that sorely needs a remaster or rerelease. This was to be a pretty straightforward beatemup through a level and a boss fight. The player could select which particular moves were to be bound to their buttons and combos, with the idea being that they were creating their own fighting style.

I never quite sharpened down exactly what the gameplay design for this was going to be. In order to prevent the player from just spamming the same “best” move or combo, I planned to eventually flash a randomized combo on the screen, where executing it would grant some kind of bonus - damage or otherwise.

This prototype was based on a game idea I’d had for years - a single-player role playing game that uses the mechanics of fighting games as its combat system. There’s definitely a lot more Fighting Game to be seen in this demo than there is Role Playing Game.

After having done so a few times, I found myself in a conundrum: I hated manual rigging characters with a fiery, possibly irrational passion, but I wanted characters to move in vaguely human being-esque ways!

So when I realized I could take my character skeletons and write a Python script to do all of the rigging for me at the click of a button, it was one of the best, most time-saving decisions I’ve made in my recent years. Not only can I have what previously took a couple of days of work in an instant, but if an improvement to the character rig comes to mind, I can modify the script, delete the rig, and and instantly have it back, new and improved on all characters!

The script is currently more Me-friendly than User-friendly, but this is the project that showed me that the amount of time saved by scripting in Maya can make it virtually essential.

I continued to use and build upon this on personal projects until I discovered Cascadeur, and now gladly use that to animate my characters instead!

My first Ludum Dare entry, and despite the message in the opening title, not the last! As a person with a full-time job, I only had two of the three days available to work on this project, and in that time I squeezed out an infinite, procedural game mechanic, character models based on a human male I had made some time ago, and a list of sound effects and music tracks to quickly steal once I was ready to call the game finished.

At work, I’m often tasked with churning out a lot of game in very little time, so it was pretty cool to be able to do the same under my own direction!

… I’ll win the next one.

This demo was inspired by elements from a bunch of my favorite platformers: Super Mario, Mega Man, and Goemon’s Great Adventure. I stopped a little before I started trying to tackle 4-player simultaneous co-op, but I still managed to put together a pretty cool prototype before moving on to something else!

This game features a character with several mobility and combat maneuvers, including but not limited to double-jumping, wall jumping, climbing, and swimming. Enemies also share a lot of the player’s arsenal, with a few cool tricks of their own! This is another project that I had to fight the urge to finish as I was getting footage for the site.

This was my first stab at a 3D beat’em up, with a combat system made to emulate the point-and-hit style of an Arkham series game.

It was around this time that I’d first seen the animation technique employed in ArcSys’ Guilty Gear XRD (on which there’s a fantastic GDC presentation), and tried to incorporate it in my game to achieve a more traditional 2D feel to the animations while still taking advantage of a 3D world.

This game contains some of the first 3D characters I’ve ever modeled, rigged, or animated, so no technique, no matter how genius, was going to make this look anywhere near the level of an ArcSys game. Regardless, I look at this game and see a project that I’d absolutely love to complete one day.

I created this game for the Student Showcase at the University of Advancing Technology. It was pretty neat having this game on display almost like an arcade cabinet in the commons.

Martial Trauma supports up to four players at a time controlled by either humans or AI. Each with three special moves that can be performed Smash Bros. style - up, down, neutral and super. There’s also a few technical maneuvers, such as the ability to block, parry, and crush an opponent’s guard, for players who intend to play this game at international tournaments.

This is a 2D side-scrolling brawler engine that I created in high school. In the downloadable gameplay demo, you control the primary character with the keyboard, and the (very frail) secondary character with the controller. The demo features multiple attacks, parallax scrolling, and enemy AI. Double-tap left or right to run, and attack while running to do a special running attack. Escape exits the game

Cobra is a 2D one-on-one fighting game I created when I was about twelve years old. I created this game in QBASIC, which was long obsolete even by the time I was using it, and had trouble distributing it at the time due to its DOS mode requirement. However, thanks to FreeBASIC, I was able to rebuild this game for Windows platforms, and thus a brand new generation of gamers can experience this masterpiece.

This may be a twelve year old’s fighting game made in QBASIC, but it pushes its limits! Featuring particle effects, six characters with two unique moves and one unique Super move, and full-screen, scrolling backgrounds drawn with vector shapes!

• Turn-based tactics game inspired by recent XCOM games. 2 or more players can drop into a procedurally genreated map and try to elminate each other’s team by out-positioning the other.
• Frame-by-frame fighting game inspired by YOMI hustle, but in a 3D space where evasion played a signficant role in combat.
• Another twist on fighting games inspired by Gladiabots. Players use an in-game interface to create the literal Behavior Trees that determine how their fighters fight.