Golden Seas is a real time strategy game where you play as a pirate lord commanding your fleets to attack and plunder the Royal Navy and her cities. The game was made with a team of two designers, one 3D artist, one UI artist, and myself as the sole programmer. It won the award for technical acheivement as well as being runner up for best in show in the 2019 Student Showcase Event at MSU.

The game has a robust world generation toolset for the designers to create maps with, as well as easy customization to all ships and cities. Teamwork and collaboration on the idea of how the final product should look went well. Everybody helped with roles other than their primary one.

The AI is not properly fleshed out at the moment and could use some beefing up, it is currently exploitable and unbalanced. Tutorial is a long wall of text, not interactable. Further work on the game would require creating a viable tutorial.

Structuring classes planning for class inheritence ahead of time. Implementing designer wishes for visuals and functionality of UI. Realtime mesh generation. XML serialization. Custom binary save files.

Welcome Detective, an incident most horrible has occurred in the land of the dead. Lord Marrow has been horrifically revived! Such unspeakable horror can only be the work of white magic, and it is up to you to figure out who committed such an atrocious crime.
Revival at Marrow Mansion is a game jam game I made along with artist Rhian Perry, I created an interface to create dialogue trees in the Unity Editor to create the dialogue in the point and click game. The dialogue editor was a massive undertaking and proved to have quite a few hard to track down bugs, I have since made a superior, node based dialogue editor that I'm still refining to this day. The dialogue was all written by myself as well. The map for navigation was incredible to make as well, only 7 lines of code manages a multi location, background changing based on hovering map system. The game's story is unfinished, but it was a fantastic amount of work for the 48 hours I had.

Creating a dialogue engine that could be used for other projects in the short time span was a fantastic experience that eventually led to me updating it as a standalone project. The system to click on things in game was fast and easy to expand, allowing lots of hidden jokes to be littered throughout the game.

A better dialogue system could be implemented so that there isn't the occassional blank line when entering a dialogue tree split. Actually finishing the story and adding a progression system to the game, one that would allow dialogue to become available after learning certain clues.

Custom tool creation that would get used across all of my future projects. Mastered scriptable objects in Unity and continue to use them to this day where they are helpful. Communicating with an artist for specific assets, specifically the map, helped me understand the art pipeline more.

The Perfect Run is a puzzle game where failing has no downside. Whenever you hit an obstacle you leave a burn in time which you can jump back to whenever you want rather than take damage or lose the level, keeping all positive progress you made and undoing any negatives. If you reach the goal of a level while still having burns remaining, AKA your starting line isn't your ending line, you then get to go back through and connect your lines, healing the burns, and perfecting the run. Every level in the end will have a single, perfect, unbroken line from start to finish. See how much you can improve your times through intentional burns and warping, and see how much you can improve the final length of your line by shortening it. Enjoy a low stakes, no pressure journey through 40 levels of particle filled wonderland.

I created a game myself! This entire project is a laundry list of things I learned while making. From proper use of static scripts, to rudimentary saving, through deploying a game to the internet. Optimizing for lower end hardware was really successful in the end since the game has a plethora of particle effects at all times.

More levels and online leaderboards for times would make the game much more interesting. Literally any marketing would help as well.

The entire process of development from planning, prototyping, playtesting, and publishing. Through two weeks of getting the movement to feel how I wanted it to. The importance of making it functional before making it pretty really shined on this project. Level design was an interesting thing to tackle, and could use some revisiting in the future.

Mail Snail is a peaceful puzzle platformer where you deliver mail to a wide cast of snails in this miniature world of wonder. Crawl on the floors, walls, and ceilings of this 2D world to make all of your deliveries and return home for a well earned rest. I worked with two other programmers to create the game, myself handling player controls, water, and simple machines.

Large team working together remotely was able to create this.

We finished it already, nothing more to do!!

A lot about 2D character controllers and 2D lighting

Star Strikers is a 3D multiplayer dogfighter where you play with up to 3 others in 2v2 combat. Fly around with full degree of motion as you shoot down your friends while trying to stay alive yourself. The multiplayer is possible thank to Photon.Pun, so working on this has involved learning a new codebase and deterministic workflows. My work has been on hit registration and gameplay loops over the network, making sure that damage is counted and kills given. The little things that we all take for granted in the games we play until they stop working. Was my first online multiplayer game I worked on, and was my final project I worked on at University. The game was made with industry oversight from Bungie to help us create a better product for our final work as students.

Created an online multiplayer game! Also got to work through the pains of being entirely remote for the project. Ended up being a fun if short experience to play with friends. Working out all the debugging issues with networking and going down the entire rabbit hole of online gaming was super inciteful.

The game could definitely use better systems outside of the gameplay loop for playing with others. Something that isn't peer to peer would also help make the game be stable enough for more than four players.

Online multiplayer and all the pains that come with it. Hit registration, aggressor's favor, and so many issues I see in AAA games make so much sense now and it was good to try to address them and implement/come up with solutions.

Plunder Panic is a swashbuckling action-arcade game for up to 12 players. Fight on teams of up to six players in online or local play to become the superior pirate crew.

I started working on the project in July 2021, joining the team to program the User Interface (UI) and cloud save data. I creating all of our UI scripts and systems that continue to be used today, for both online deterministic UI and local UI. After this, tackling the cloud data using Playfab and implementing full stat tracking throughout the entire game, learning Photon Quantum to do so. I continued to add new features for the first half a year to flesh out game systems.

At that point we released into early access on Steam, and the console porting went into full swing. I was in charge of Technical Requirement Checklists (TRC) on all platforms, becoming the go to person for greenlighting features once they met compliance. I was personally in charge of making the modifications for PlayStation consoles, every console required a plethora of work due to the mixed online and offline nature of our game, while supporting full cross-play between all consoles.

Throughout the development process, we took the game to multiple conferences, at all of which I was in charge of the booth and enticing people in to play the game, during PAX East 2022 alone I taught over 1,300 people how to play our game personally during my booth shifts, collecting feedback and converting attendees into customers and fans.

I have experience working with and publishing on all consoles now. Working with the same team and codebase for over a year has also proven that it was worth spending extra time making robust systems to be expanded upon in the beginning, as I've been able to build another year's worth of development on top of my initial UI scripts without needing to rewrite or refactor them.

We're continuing to work on the game still, adding new items, maps, and game modes. We're still pushing to flesh out the active player base to sustain the matchmaking queues better outside of our gathering times when players get on to queue up. Marketing has been a struggle, we show very well at in person events, but online traction has been slippery at best.

Console porting and all the challenges that come with meeting each platforms technical requirements, many of which are incompatible with other platforms requirements. I also learned about making Elo and matchmaking systems for our ranked queue, along with leaderboards for a variety of stats, which is something I've been wanting to learn for a while.

Blastball: All-Stars is a local multiplayer action sports game that lets you play through a variety of sports with your friends.

This game started production after Plunder Panic was finished, and was the first professional project where I was lead programmer and led a team of three junior programmers. It started out more like a top down Lethal League, but iteration and following the fun led us to our variety sport game. Leading junior developers was a fun and good experience, and I enjoy teaching others so this naturally flowed together. Many of our UI scripts were able to be taken from Plunder Panic and reused as well, which was confidence inspiring after the time that had been originally put in to make sure the scripts would work in other solutions.

The art styles have continued to be fluid and evolve as time has progressed, each iteration has been better than the previous as we approach the release of the game. I definitely learned a hard lesson about being willing to give criticism to coworkers when needed, while it isn't fun, it needs to be done at times.

A very fun game for all ages. Playtesters old and young both enjoy it. Learned to lead a team of developers in a professional setting. Was able to reuse lots of scripts that I have made in the past, and wrote even more that will continue to be used in the future.

Fleshing out juice and a more intuitive tutorial are the largest upgrades in my court. There is a potential to update the game to be online multiplayer as well, but the scope of that is too high for our current funding.

I relearned linear algebra for this project. I hadn't touched it since college and this entire game was a neat return to 3D math and vector multiplication. I also learned some basics of ShaderGraph, although I have a long way to go before I'd consider myself proficient with it.

A game breaking puzzle game that exceeds the limits of a normal game. I worked on this as a side project while making Blastball: All-Stars and Incremantal. It's simple in both concept and execution, but it was a lot of fun coming up with different puzzles. Both the cliche ones and the unique ones.

Working on this was incredibly easy because of how modular each level was. Whenever I had an idea for a new level, it could be made and simply added in. This was also a fantastic game to implement playtester ideas for levels, which made the solo project still collaborative.

If I ever come up with enough level ideas I'll make another. But I am quite happy with how this turned out.

I learned how to work with Windows DLL's, as well as how to do some niche file system tricks. The part of making the game that involved the most learning was the artwork for the store and library pages. The game itself was mostly lots of simple things utilized in clever ways.

I enjoy playing incremental and idle games but wanted to do something new. Every game I've ever played counts in base 10, which is natural, because that's what we all count in. So I decided to make a game where you instead upgrade what base you count in, and purchase additional digits to write your number in as well. This provides a dynamic cap to how many resources you can have, and is a unique take on a game genre that can sometimes be samey.

The game eventually got a narrative and skin of creating life, and I was able to take real life biological mechanisms to use as unlocks and gates for the player to pass. It's fun having a game that actually teaches you some things while you play it, and I enjoyed all the research that went into it as well.

This was a good incremental to work on UI juice before the one I care more about comes out. I'll definitely use parts of this in other games I make, and it was nice being able to pull scripts from other games to help make this one faster. It made good, slow progress as a side project for four months before I made it the primary thing I was working on for the final two months, where it rocketed along to a solid, finished product.

I still struggle with deciding how to do audio, and with artwork in my solo projects. I was smart enough to recognize that I can use others help and used asset bundles for the planets and stars. The only major feature I haven't implemented yet that I want to is animations for the Extinction Events. Whether it's a volcano, ice age, or alien abduction, I think adding some animations in for that would be fun and funny for my players.

A lot about biology, but mostly optimization. Unlike my other incremental game I'm working on, this one inherently struggles with performance due to counting in non-standard bases and the additional math that is needed to constantly rewrite and display massive numbers in increasing complicated ways.