Category: Programming

Golden Loft

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In Golden Loft, you will explore your grandfather’s attic and uncover his fascination with the Golden Ratio. Through this journey, you will learn about the Golden Ratio and Phi. Some of the greatest mathematical minds throughout the ages from the Ancient Greeks to modern day have been entranced by the Golden Ratio and its properties. But this is no boring lecture. Play with various contraptions and curios that your grandfather found in the world and brought back to his attic. Dive into the history of the Fibonacci Numbers and how they got their name, alongside where those numbers appear throughout the world. But most interestingly, you will discover how all of these elements are intertwined and have fascinating relationships with each other, and appear throughout nature, architecture, and art. Play, explore, and learn about the Golden Ratio and Phi in Golden Loft.

This game is available for free on Oculus Rift, Oculus Go, and Oculus GearVR.

This game was created over the course of 3 months with a team of two working full time. The game is designed to teach people about math, without requiring any math or calculations to progress through the experience.

My partner and I inherited this project from another team, furthering their initial concepts and making the game our own. We added more than five times as much content, as well as creating a narrative and tutorial for the game.

For this project, I was in charge of Design, Programming, Research, Writing, Usability, and Sound Design. I ideated and itterated upon every lesson and interactable within the game, as well as implemented and optimized every lesson and interactable. If you would like to see a code sample from this project, please click here.

I also researched Phi, the Golden Ratio, and Fibonacci Numbers extensively, and wrote the dialogue and voice over to condense what I had learned into easily understandable and interesting lines for the player to learn from as they play with various interactables.

Finally, I sourced most of the sounds in the game, as well as editing them to make them appropriate to the context of the game.

Fool’s Errand

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Fool’s Errand is a card-based dungeon crawler with deckbuilding elements! Explore through multiple dungeons fighting off manical jesters as you continue on a fool’s errand.

This game was created over the course of 4 weeks in April 2020 with a team of 3 people.

For this project, I was both the lead designer of the project, and programmed any aspect of the game that involved the cards.

This prototype was created as an expirement in communication without using any form of text – numbers or letters. I was inspired by traditional playing cards and their design, and made a dungeon crawler with the intention of eventually building in more deck building elements. Additionally, we experimented with discretization, making the game real time rather than turn based as is genre convention for card based games.

This real-time factor made the game interesting and unique, but made the already difficult to understand game even more confusing, where players were getting frustrated.

This project was voted on by a class of 30 to continue development, where we gained another teammate. Over the next three weeks, we focused on refining the core of the game before expanding into new territory, emphasizing usability.

Now the game is at a state where the core gameloop is entertaining, and additional content can now be built out of this core system!

Click here if you would like to see a code sample, and Click here if you would like to play the game for yourself!

HexiDecimal

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HexiDecimal is a fast paced action game, which is a new take on hacking, where you eliminate the floating packets of data while avoiding the firewalls looking to take you out! But be careful – you leave a trail of destruction in your wake and can’t move onto those hexes!

HexiDecimal was created as a prototype in March 2020 within a single week as a team of 2 people.

The project explored mixing discretization and continuous structures, both in the game’s movement and actions taken, where the actions and movement are all very discrete, while all enemy movement is completely continuous.

For this prototype, I came up with the original concept, as well as programmed the main player, camera movement, and all of the particle effects.

Click here for a code sample, and click here if you would like to play the game yourself!

Going Up

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Going Up is a single player puzzle platformer for the PC where you are a slime trying to escape a steampunk factory!

Gravity is all out of sorts in this factory though, so whenever you let go of a surface, you fall to what you concieve is “up”. However, there is no true up. Will you be able to escape the factory or will you get disoriented and never find your way out?

Click here to download the game to play it for yourself!

This game was selected to be developed as a final project in the University of Southern California’s Introduction to Game Development class.

I spearheaded a two-person team in the ideation and iteration of core mechanics and level design. The levels are designed to create interesting puzzles through a simple set of mechanics. As part of this level design, I also tested the levels to ensure functionality and that they were challanging the player.

I was responsible for over 80% of the programming within Unity, which you can see a code sample here. As part of the project, I designed the stages with usability tutorialization principles to make teaching learning the game’s mechanics fun and engaging while also being educational.

In addition, I created a press kit for this game, which you can see at goingupgame.github.io. The final level of the game has a large jump in difficulty, since it was intended to showcase the complexity possible with the game’s simple set of mechanics.

Masking the Murder

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Masking the Murder is a third person rhythm action hybrid game for PC where you play as an assassin aiming to get revenge on one who betrayed you. Set in a grand dance hall, your target is hidden amongst the other dancers in the room. Remain hidden and blend in to close the distance to take them out. Will you mask the murder?

If you would like to try this game for yourself, click here to download a build for Windows and Mac!

Masking the Murder was developed over the course of 10 weeks with about 160 people hours worth of work. Except for a handful of assets, all content and assets were created during this time period. I programmed any system that interacted with the music and rhythm, as well as about half of the other code. For a code sample, please click here.

In addition to programming, I rigged and animated the characters, as well as modelled the trees and the chandeliers.

Masking the Murder was inspired by a scene from John Wick, where John was in a large dance hall, shooting on beat with the music in order to remain undetected.

This game also served as an experimental test to work with third person cameras, as well as creating a rhythm game, especially one mixed with a shooter.