Idle Words
Engine: Godot
Genre: Idle-Spelling
Platform: HTML5
Player Count: Singleplayer
Roles: Project Lead, Game Design, Artist, SFX
Team Size: 2
IdleWords is a idle game where you spell words with tiles to gain more money. Use money to buy more tiles, progress your tiles further in the alphabet, and unlock permanent upgrades. Spelling a word multiplies the output of all letters in that word by the number of letters in the word.
The game was created in a month by my brother and I while we worked on other things. The design of the game was trying to give idle games a little more room for customization and offering more noticeable differences between people's playthroughs.
The Interloper
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Genre: Puzzle Platformer
Platform: PC
Player Count: Singleplayer
Roles: Tech Lead, Design Lead, Puzzle Design, User Research
Team Size: 7 team members, 5 contractors
The Interloper is a puzzle platformer game about using time travel to solve puzzles and discover what happened to an ancient alien race.
The main mechanic of the game is using portable relics that you can use to hop between timelines. Between the deserted past and the crumbling present, you'll need to time travel frequently in order to solve puzzles and overcome obstacles.
The game uses a custom material node that I made that determines which timeline an object exists in. The material and texture artists were able to plug in textures and colors into inputs (one for past, one for present), and then the node will determine which one to be used depending on the timeline the player is in.
In addition, we have custom collision channels so the player doesn't run into any unseen geometry.
When designing areas, our workflow was generally that I would pitch a few mechanic ideas, like chutes and moving platforms. We'd consider which ones we liked, and then our concept artist would develop a look for a room with that mechanic present.
Next, I'd go in and develop the gray box of the level, based on the concept art but with puzzles implemented in.
Finally, our modelers and texture artist would populate the gray box with final assets. I run through one last time to make sure everything is working.
The project lead and I made several game mechanics, as well as several that were scrapped afterwards for not fitting in. The ones left in game include relics, levers, doors, relic-based buttons, chutes for transporting relics, turrets, moving platforms, on-off levers and platforms, and combiner rings which turn the relics into a single more useful relic.
My main jobs were the chutes, on-off variants, combiner rings, and the relics themselves, in addition to programming the player character and checkpoints.
Approaching our deadline, I started conducting research. At the time, our game's design had quite a few flaws, primarily lack of guidance, and as the Design Lead it was up to me to fix it.
I got 8 people to volunteer to test our game. They played through the game while I recorded their gameplay and their reactions, and also wrote down any observations I made.
Using this data, we were able to really quick find out a lot of key flaws in our game and fix them, with each tester getting further than the last in less time with a more positive attitude.
Time Steal
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Genre: Action Platformer
Platform: PC
Player Count: Singleplayer
Roles: All
Team Size: 1
Time Steal is my current in-progress solo project.
It revolves around platforming and hitting targets to gain speed. The idea came from being mechanically similar to a movement shooter, but with a different aesthetic (ie. no violence)
The main mechanic of the game clicking on moving objects to increase your Dash capacity. Allowing you to activate helpful objects or just increase your speed. The goal is to complete a level as quick as possible.
Movement options include:
Pre jumps: Jumping before hitting the ground nets in a burst of speed.
Wall Running: You move along white walls you're adjacent to
Dash: If you've stopped an item, you can boost forward quickly using it's speed
Queen of the Garden
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Genre: Town Builder, Gacha
Platform: Android
Player Count: Singleplayer
Roles: Programming
Team Size: 6 team members
Queen of the Garden is a game about a queen bee commanding other bees and insect to save the forest.
The first thing I wanted to make was randomly generated hex-tile terrain. After getting it to generate the grid, I started working making rivers in that terrain for variety. The obvious problem was that my scale was too small too accommodate a river so I had to scale it up a lot. Then I used splines to make the river more curvy and not a bunch of straight lines.
Generating the tiles was cool, though I needed it to actually save it, so I put in some code so that it would only generate the terrain if you didn't have any saved, and load any you did have saved.
I also worked on making a system for commanding troops. Basic AI that would follow through with point and click commands. One of these troop types had a light source that allowed them to traverse darkness so I had to make a custom darkness material and blueprint to allow for this. Only the light troops can go through the darkness and will illuminate the area around them.
Another troop type had the ability to use jump pads, and I implemented that ability as well. The jump pads ended up needing to detect the difference in height between the two pads so that it could have a proper arc because otherwise it would peak at the wrong point in time.
Finally, I wanted to save our level designer a ton of hassle when it came to placing down hex tiles, so I created a volume for them to use that would make a hex grid that followed the form of any geometry they placed. I put a bunch of controls on it like the ability to ignore specific actors and the ability to change the material of the grid to match the materials of the geometry it's placed on top of.
Cordy: The Fungus Among Us
Created in Unreal Engine 4
Responsibilities: Programming
Cordy: The Fungus Among Us is a game where you play as a sentient cordyceps fungus, nicknamed Cordy.
Much like a cordyceps fungus, Cordy's main ability is the ability to control insect. Cordy's primary objective is to find other fungus like him. The player can take control of three different fungus, swapping between them, and each fungus has the ability to take control of an insect to use their unique abilities to their advantage.
Early prototype of the possession mechanic
I was the systems designer and blueprinter for Cordy: The Fungus Among Us, and did almost all of the blueprinting solo. I was in charge of creating the fungus, insects, objects the insects can interact with, buttons, doors, hazards, and AI.
Demo of Cordy's gliding, possession, and fungus swapping abilities.
Cordy's crowded event graph blueprint
The creation of Cordy consisted of a team of 6 main roles: game designer, level designer, 3d modeler, animator, sound designer, and systems designer.