As a member of a team with two other students: Alex Milne, and Joshua Bosma, we developed a fully featured print and play card game for 2 – 4 players. Players will take the position of “Wealthy Tycoons”, seeking to control various cards – aiming for synergy and formulating strategies in preparation for trading and conquering the battlefields of the underworld. Through trickery, social deduction, and tactics – winning and losing can come down to the wire, but in the end it is all about that wealth.

Having completed a 24HR game jam the week prior, I didn’t realise that this jam was running – due to this, I started ~24hrs late for this game jam. However, with my improved skills – and falling back to an engine I am extremely comfortable with allowed me to build a full game with time to spare. Following the theme, my immediate decision was to build a Battle Royale game. As I was working on Pixel Art for the first time in my elective during this time, I decided to make it a top down pixel art battle royale. Using my old experience in Godot, I quickly put together a prototype that had all of the final functionality seen in the end game. This allowed me to practice pixel art for all of the elements within the game. I finished all of this development so fast that I had the option to create multiple different levels/arenas before submitting the game.

This game was designed in a team of 3 students, Joshua Bosma, Alex Milne, and myself. After brainstorming as a team, we decided upon this small top down arena shooter that utilised dice rolls for everything pertinent. I handled the programming, animation, sound effect mastering, building, and submission for this project. Alex and Joshua handled aspects of planning, aspects of sound effects, music selection, VFX and 3D models/textures within the game. You control a character who is within a D&D dice box, dodging enemy dice whilst your weapon and its power are randomly decided by friendly dice. You control nothing but movement – which is thrown off by physics based momentum and forces from the weapon that autofires, killing as many enemies and surviving as long as you can is your goal.

In the development of this game, My focus was on the cute character design. To this end, a simple gameplay loop that could be expanded upon if the fancy took me was decided. The development process for this game was also livestreamed on Twitch to an audience, who provided input at key points regarding the designs I settled on. The game is a play on the old city destruction games, though in this case – the citizenry voted for a Kaiju to become the Mayor of their town. In your benevolence, you are destroying property and military assets to gain insurance money for city refurbishment programs. The game is a top down/isometric perspective game with basic keyboard and mouse controls. Movement with WASD, jumping with Spacebar, Melee and Range attacks with the mouse buttons. The goal is to destroy as much property as possible in the time limit, whilst staying alive.

Utilising the experience gained from arcade style rigidbody controllers in my previous project, I once more created a top down game. This time I focused on having basic random dungeon generation with set rooms, and a minigame style system for the harvesting (utilising additive scenes). There was a lot of tweaking and math involved in making the debt calculations and difficulty escalation feel balanced – however, as with most Game Jams – the balance was not perfect in the final release.

A top down game designed, planned, and executed as part of the TAFE course (Animation, Gaming and Visual Effects). This was then further polished so that it could be presented at the TAFE Showcase night for people to see what is possible, and to also enjoy. The goal of the game is to survive for the entire 5 minute duration, whilst powering yourself up by destroying enemies using your magic skills. The higher your level, the more damage you do, and the more abilities you unlock. This is a showcase of UI work created in Adobe Illustrator. The WebGL version of the game has been optimized to work taking into account the limitations of WebGL 2.0 (in that WebGL cannot currently handle geometry shaders/etc). This game has been designed to work comfortably with either Keyboard + Mouse, or Gamepad.

Moving back into the Unity engine, as the TAFE course that I started around the time of this game jam focuses on Unity. I was using this game jam to re-familiarise myself with the Unity workflow, after spending nearly a year perfecting my understanding of the Godot Game Engine. The transition was smooth, and I ended up with a slightly buggy yet quick game. This is another FPS with rigidbody style movement mechanics, locked to a small arena with constant waves of dice trying to destroy you. The game was inspired by Devil Daggers (in both its simplicity, as well as the hand weapon & movement).

A top down factory style game where you play as a plucky little capacitor that can build machinery and processors. This game was inspired by Factorio and similar automation style games. Your goal is to harvest resources (Signal, Memory, Data) and construct those basic elements into multiple tiers of new resources – until you can finally send “Packets” to the central Wi-Fi node on the circuit board.

A top down twin stick shooter that contains evolving upgrades (for primary and secondary abilities), a levelling system, and (seeded) procedurally generated levels. The goal is to proceed through all levels (limited to 3 for the Jam) clearing away existing enemies and proceeding to the exits of the stages. This game carries heavy influence from Nuclear Throne, as well as other popular twin stick shooters of its time.

Continuing to use the new Godot engine, I decided to challenge myself for this game jam – and mark off another first time: My first FPS game. This game involves randomly generated dungeons filled with combat encounters – the goal of which is to destroy all enemies within rooms (doors automatically lock you into rooms until all enemies are gone) and make your way to the end of the dungeon as fast as you can. Your “Blood” (energy source) meter continually drains – and refills on each enemy destruction. All world meshes (including normals/tangents/UV s & colliders) are generated on the fly. The Jam version of the game uses a very slow method, but further work was completed outside of the jam to optimize the generation methods to the extreme, providing a fun challenge and learning experience in mesh generation using matrices.

My first time using a new engine: Godot, an open source engine I’ve been hearing a lot about. It is completely different to Unity in all ways, and has many different quirks that took time and difficulty to overcome. The game is based on a similar idea to the recently popular games “Overcooked” and “Catastronauts”, where you must cook food for hungry customers – whilst managing the unstable reactor’s temperature levels, ensuring it doesn’t overheat and cause a fission event. Parts of the original plan (random fires that required extinguishing, varied level arrangements, and multiplayer) were scrapped to meet the Jam’s deadline, a result of using a new engine. Game uses standard Top-down movement (WASD/Arrows), and different interact keys for machinery and pickup/putdown actions.

My first Unity 2D game ever attempted, the theme being rotation lead me to creating a sort of Rhythm game based on rotating to reflect/kick back balls thrown by enemies. To add another layer of strategy at higher tiers of difficulty, certain enemies would throw rockets that required you to swap into a different form using a key/mouse button. After each successful play through of the song, its tempo increases slightly – and matching the bpm – enemies spawn and attack faster too. A simple game where you are only seeking a high score. Again, scriptable objects on all of the different enemies made it reasonably fast to set up enemies and the spawner logic. Game used top-down movement solely from the mouse, wherever the mouse was on the field – the character rotated towards it.

A game that is an amalgamation of Autochess, and the old Snake game (to a degree). You are a Monkey that is escaping from a testing facility, using Banana’s that you earn (find) on the way to bribe other monkeys to assist you. Those other monkeys are tethered to you (as they lack intelligence) and each different type of monkey performs different actions. (These monkeys were all set up using Scriptable Objects, allowing for quick development and deployment of all the different interactions). Outside of this mechanic, you fight back waves each floor – upon beating the floors you gain bananas (with the possibility of gaining interest based on banked bananas in your possession). Game uses automatic movement (akin to Snake) – you can only turn left/right, and will bounce back off walls.

A game where you play a spirit stuck within the layers of hell, after awaking you find a weapon, and start heading deeper and deeper through the layers of hell to search for that ephemeral place known as “P
aradise”. This game development was streamed via Twitch, and the audience decided upon the final boss. The decision was between a more realistic “Dante’s Inferno” style Lucifer, or the Lucifer from the game “Helltaker”. The latter won, and thus I created the 3D model and animations of Lucifer for the final boss fight. As it was a game jam, I ran out of time to create the desired bosses of each layer, as over scoped as that is for ~48hrs of development time. Game used top-down based movement, akin to other Boss Rush games (normally in 2D), but in a 3D world, with attack combinations through state machines for Light Attack, and Heavy Attacks.

A game that takes place on a “Shadow Puppet” stage, following the story of a certain magical shadow puppet. Throughout the game – scenes loop whilst the narrator (me) makes fun of the game developer (also me) for making mistakes in “flag checks”, allowing the player to abuse the fact each scene resets back to normal when a loop is reached. Using the different quests as triggers for zone changes, allows easy money making by looping scenes, and retrying dialogue trees with previously killed/angered NPCs in the town. Game used 3D point and click based movement on a limited stage. At this point in game development, I started heavily relying on and improving my workflow with Scriptable Objects.

An arcade game where you must take revenge against the village that has cut down parts of the mushroom forest to build their homes. You launch shroomlings that will spread a fungal growth from locations they hit (ground/building) that have small movement and bounce/jump capability. Each game gives you 5 shroomlings to attempt to reach maximum scores – final score is determined by how much of the village has been reclaimed by the fungal spores, as well as bonuses from various tricks/bounces made whilst attacking the village. Game used aerial flight based manoeuvring with elastic/bouncing based physics.

A 3D adventure game, in the style of old PS1 games like Spyro/Medievil/etc. To keep in line with the theme, the story was that the “Flames of Imagination” are naught but a spark now, and your goal is to restore the spark to its former glory – by ridding the different fantasy races of the corruption that now inflicts them. Game used standard 3rd person movement and attack combinations using state machines.

A casual fishing game, mixed with a small idle game system. You start out on a wooden raft with nothing but a bit of wire, the goal of the game is to fish up souls that will pay you for the trip from dock to dock. These ghosts come in many forms, and pay a $ amount incrementally. Alongside these passengers, you can also fish up treasure or junk – that provides an instant boost to your total $. At the end of each run, you meet the shop keeper – who will sell you rod and boat upgrades, each upgrade providing different improvements – such as % increase on $/sec from passengers, or % increase in sale value of treasure/junk. Game included 5 tiers of upgrade, each with unique models and mounting positions for the player character and passengers. Game is played solely with the mouse, no keyboard usage at all – cast rod to mouse location, and click options with mouse too.

A tower defense style game, where you spend the life of your base to build and upgrade defense turrets. The turrets were specialized forms of Mosquitos, as you played a mosquito protecting your spawning pool. Waves would increase in difficulty until overrun, or reaching the maximum round. After which you could use meta items (DNA/RNA) that you picked up during the waves of invaders to permanently upgrade your tower stats for future runs. Game used orthographic character movement, looking towards the mouse location, with builder mode for placing towers.