Game Jams
Time for a rapid fire round. Here are some miscellaneous game jams / side projects.
Cooties
Ian Strandburg and I set out to build a shopping simulator where sick shoppers can sneeze and spread infection.
Voxel RPG Game… Thing
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Voxel Destruction Tech Demo
C#, Unity, Heavy Optimization, Custom Asset Pipeline
A voxel destruction tech demo for a game concept where each voxel type had special properties. An enemy might have armor voxels that take more force to break; once the skin was broken it would start taking damage, and hitting an organ voxel was fatal. There was also a concept for using the tech in a VR mech 1v1 boxing game.
The challenge was updating meshes and colliders as quickly as possible: characters with over 100,000 voxels had to be recalculated in fractions of a second. I solved it with a multithreaded solution with models split into chunks. Voxelized models came in as binary files; meshes and materials were built on import and at runtime when destruction occurred, with voxel textures driven by Substances so we could quickly stylize them.
The destruction took a few days to get running with mesh and collider builders on their own thread. I spent a day exploring rendering with a geometry shader instead of rebuilding meshes, but it required SM4 and had limitations, so I abandoned it. About a week went into iterating on the asset pipeline.
Squirm Food
C#, Unity, iOS, Android, Web Services
Another game Ian Strandburg and I worked on, started at the beginning of 2015. A puzzle game where the player navigates levels to get monster parts to the bottom of the machine. Built for iOS and Android and ran great on both, but was never released.
I was responsible for everything that required programming: gameplay, art-pipeline tools, a level editor, UI, and a web version where testers could play levels. Our web server collected data about playthroughs and tester feedback for each level. My counterpart shared game design and did all of the art.
Zelda Dungeon Recreation
In November 2017 I took a challenge to clone a Zelda dungeon in 7 days. I was solo, so I did all the gameplay, all the glorious programmer art, and the level. I finished within the 7 days, then took 3 extra days for polish.
VR Frogger (8 hour jam)
An 8 hour VR game jam in 2015: a spooky first-person Frogger with a single level and cars as obstacles. Another jammer provided the art. Easter egg: look behind you into the sky and you’d see the window of an arcade machine, as if you were inside it, with a creepy face peering in that mirrored your headset’s head movement.
