Overview
Knight's Chess is a remake of an old project I had done;
a test to see how much more I know now than I did then.
It was also fun to add elements that were completely absent from the original. For instance UI.
That's right the original
had NO UI at all and was just a 'press spacebar to play' kind of experience. Another was more
consistent art to make the game feel
less jarring.
One of the major appeals to me of the original was the juice the game had, so naturally I tried to
emphasize this throughout the entire
project. Tiles, game pieces, and the UI all move elegantly across the screen, with some having
squish and stretch animations tied to them.
Music and SFX were also added (with a toggle of course) that added an extra layer to really sell the
idea of being in the
atmosphere of somewhere cozy as well making it feel like pieces moving along a board.
Challenges
Most of the challenges came up towards the end of the project. The goal was to release this on the Google Play Store, which getting to launching took about 2 days of setup with all the different ad vendors. The real problem arose when going through the process of actually listing it to the Play Store. The requirements for testing requires 20 people to be in a closed test and regularly use the app over the course of 14 days.
Skills & Tech
C# / Unity, 2D Maths, Danial's leaderboard tool, heaps of debugging, and a touch of XML for editing the android manifest.
Return to TopOverview
Paraparazzi was the first game at 302 Interactive that I was given a lead role. The designs and usage of other developers was my responsibility and I did my best
to make sure everyone was working on what they were most suited for. The game revovles around a super star spy that is in an endless free-fall with paparazzi
trying to get pictures of them. The objective was to pose for pictures (you are a super star after all) to maintain popularity but also avoid being caught
by bad guys trying to kidnap you.
Overall the project took about a month from paper to a final WebGL build and gave me a lot of insight on the leadership qualities to maintain an effective team. The project
wasn't without it's faults and low points, but we got there and ended up with a solid short form game.
Challenges
The game design, while on paper simple, proved rather difficult to translate into a fun short game experience. There were many iterations focussing on the interaction of the bad guys and the other characters. Initially they'd try to get paparazzi rather than the player and it just never felt right. We tried different patterns, amounts, spawn variance, but nothing worked. Then a simply suggestion arose that seemed to fix everything; have the bad guys try to get the player. Something about that simple change made the game go from pretty tedious to a pretty fun web game. There were of course many other changes and tweaks but that one really drove the game home.
Skills & Tech
C# / Unity, Team Leadership, Game Design
Return to TopOverview
Just about every project is unique and requires unique scripts, assets, and structure; however, there are some elements that are used in almost every project. These UI tools
I've made help me get menus and buttons looking and feeling good really quickly on new projects. The biggest benefit to me is the control over groups and how they should appear.
So as soon as you're out of the main menu, all the relevant menus close and the next group can open. Then of course buttons are always great. While the default Unity / TextMeshPro
buttons are good, they do have some limitations. Sometimes buttons need to move or animate while also changing sprites or adjusting text. These "Juicy Buttons", as I've been
calling them, allow for multiple entry points for interaction. They can be toggled to require a hold time, animate or more around, and have events for more than just OnClick such
as detecting mouse hover.
On top of the UI features, this demo also includes a pooler I wrote. This pooler is included in every project of mine just because of how useful pooling is. This reduces overhead
for instantiating large groups of gameobjects and greatly helps with performance. I wrote this for an old project called Urban RPG (which will see the light of day... eventually)
because I had a system for displaying interactions where a wheel with each interaction would appear above the player. Just a short list on this wheel caused dips in FPS, so I wrote
the pooler and all the frame issues went away!
Challenges
The biggest challenge I found when it comes to writing "universal" tools is the usability of those tools when using them from a designer perspective. As I am writing functions
and classes, it seems easy to interact with those functions and classes while in the code; but once in the inspector the entire thing gets flipped upside down. Suddenly there
is a lot of dragging and dropping, clicking through lists, avoiding some toggles that sounded useful but actually are never used. It's hard to strip away functionality when you
think maybe one day it could be used, but it's harder for someone to use the tool climbing over useless to them options.
Even now the tools in this demo are not in a state that I would be 100% comfortable handing off to someone without going over some of the nuances. That being said, these tools
are evolving regularly to make them easier and easier to use and one day they will have a download link here and on the itch page for them!
Skills & Tech
C# / Unity, Tool Design, UX Design
Return to TopOverview
Rogue Rally was the first big game project I was a part of while at 302 Interactive. There was a lot of love for the idea in the office for pushing out a game of our own.
The game consisted of rooms that were randomly generated for each course and the player could collect gears to upgrade their vehicle and keys to race bosses.
The first thing I got to work on was designing my own room. Pretty basic stuff but it was fun to leverage my level design skills since most of the time I am writing code.
Eventually I got to make bigger and more elaborate rooms and I wish I was able to get pictures of some of them because I was pretty proud of the choices they gave to the player.
Aside level design, I was also tasked with getting the settings working so that the player could do all the usual configuring to get the performance and feel of the game that suits them.
Challenges
While there was love for the game in the office, there just wasn't the resources for it. We needed to shift gears back to client projects and it was just wasn't in the cards to keep development going for a game that didn't have a end in sight. This was a tough pill to swallow for everyone but it was the right call as far as the company's well being was concerned.
Skills & Tech
C# / Unity, Level Design, Tool Design, UX Design
Return to TopOverview
Rub-a-Belly's Cat was the second game that was part of a batch of games that 302 made to boost social media presence and to make short form games. These games weren't
given much time week to week (about 8 hours total a week). So it was very interesting to completely shit focus to this game every Friday and get to work with people I
didn't often get to.
The gameplay is pretty fun and addictive. The game was ported to a touch screen device and on display at a convention, where it was really well received. The ramp in difficulty
was really fun to work on as I got to implement some of the attacks. On top of that I worked on UI as I did on a lot of the game projects I did at 302.
Still not sure I get the name of the game though...
Challenges
The main challenge was having everyone shift to the project on a single day, catch up, figure out what they needed to work on, then get as much done as they could before closing time. The design changes ended up bleeding over into days outside of the project scope, but in the end was a very fun short game.
Skills & Tech
C# / Unity, UI / UX Design
Return to Top