Other Projects & Coursework
Here you'll find projects I've worked on that are either small in scale
or projects that don't necessarily even involve digital games.
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Spline Shooter
Spline Shooter was a project I created as part of the coursework of a class called Design and Development of Information Systems.
The assignment was very much open-ended and required to create a game that wasn't directly pulled off of YouTube tutorials as well as creating its Design Document and creating a presentation regarding various free Game Engines.
Project Goals:
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Create a mostly generic space shooter that explored something interesting in terms of design or development.
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In all honesty, pass the class with, preferably, a good grade.
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Have fun along the way.
The Result:
The project was completed successfully, netting me a 9/10 grade. I chose to develop the project in Unreal Engine 4, since the core workload of Spline Shooter revolved around an idea I had regarding enemy pathing through multiple splines, which splines I happened to be familiar with within UE4.
Most of the development time was spent working on said spline system.
By the end of the project I had managed to create a system that handled spawning and movement of all enemy entities based on looping or non-looping splines. Creation of new spline paths as well as creation and assignment of enemy groups was done fairly easily and could be fine-tuned at any moment.
Creating and assigning enemy groups to splines could be done serially or randomly. Bosses (although I never managed to include proper boss fights in the game) could also be assigned to a looping spline and change preferred pathing spline mid-fight if the encounter warranted it.
Aesthetically the game wasn't anything to phone home about, I chose to shave time from development by downloading freely available spaceship assets and sound effects. I played around a bit with materials and a rotating skybox to improve the visuals a bit or at least make it not painful to look at.
In the end, the project was something I was quite pleased with. The spline-based pathing system was very expandable and malleable as well as lightweight compared to other pathing solutions, and the end result of the project was solid groundwork from which an actual Space-shooter-like game could jump off of and be developed.
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Dungeons and Dragons
DMing my own Dungeons and Dragons campaign might not exactly be the thing you would expect to find on a portfolio, but to me, interacting with DnD's rules and its world as a DM and sometimes as a player is something I draw a lot of design experience and creativity from.
Why Dungeons and Dragons makes me a better designer:
DnD taught me how to operate within the confines of a pre-existing game and its rule systems to deliver a satisfying storytelling and gameplay experience.
Running your own campaign is very much like juggling multiple balls in the air; every interactive element of the game hangs upon you to present it within your world and enable your players to interact with it.
Preparing the world beforehand for your players and changing it, morphing and and tweaking it in real time to adjust to their actions is nothing more than a very complicated balancing act. Players never do what you expect them to do and its in your hands to evolve and adapt as a Dungeon Master to literally design the game in real time to fit your player's actions.
Even if I don't always create my own adventures to run for my players, there's a lot to be gained from choosing to run ready adventures.
Running and implementing pre-made adventures of various complexity within my world helped me witness (through a unique, to me, perspective), the fine details and techniques that go into implementing the rules of DnD into a storytelling experience with the goal of creating a fun player, as well as DM experience.
To me, that perspective has helped me grasp the fundamentals of classic and asymmetrical gameplay design, since Dungeons and Dragons as well as pre-made adventures are designed to be fun for the players and Dungeon Masters.