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Date of Creation: Spring 2010

Description:

The player takes on the exciting role of a cherry shrimp released into an aquarium being infested with ever-growing algae.  Using a simple mouse-only interaction scheme, the player drifts and dives around the tank, consuming any algae that he/she comes into contact with.  The algae never stops growing and it’s the player’s job to keep it in check or the tank become unlivable and the game ends.

This game was created over the course of the 48 hours of a weekend.  I and four other developers(Ben Cabot, Aaron Baker, Khalil Wehbi, and Gil Medina) teamed up to challenge ourselves to rapidly develop a game and see what we could produce under these constraints, similar to the Global Game Jam (minus the “global” part).  The result was this simple, open-ended game.

Technology: XNA Game Studio

Date of Creation: Summer 2009-Present

Description:

Doctor Molecule is currently in production.  It is a 2D action-puzzle platformer in which the player uses a variety of chemistry-based abilities to alter the environment, attack enemies, and progress further in the game.  The player uses atoms gathered as resources in the world to build molecules, which act as the player’s abilities.

The game encourages exploration and simulates scientific experimentation in combining atoms in different patterns to discover if the result creates a viable molecular ability.

Technology: Torque Game Builder

Game Website

Watch it in action!

Download Document (PDF)

Date of Creation: Spring 2008-May 2009

Game Description:

Dismantle Repair is a team-based first-person shooter where players must build a tower out of material gathered from the surrounding environment.  Both teams are competing to build their tower to the required height before the other and must fight over resources.  Players can steal blocks, attempt to topple their opponent’s tower, or use a class-based ability system to hamper their foes progress or help their allies.  The game is an exercise in cooperative and competitive play.

Project Description: Capstone Project – Full Game Production

I worked on a full-size, 27 student development team including four disciplines of study (designer, programming, art, and sound design) to create a game from start to finish over the course of one year, including documentation, pre-production, production, QA, beta, alpha, release candidate and gold release phases.

The professor acted as the producer and students were assigned positions on the team to fulfill industry-standard roles.  A task management system was utilized, requiring students to work on assigned tasks, consider dependencies and bottlenecks, plan for milestones and deliverables, and account for their development time.  Additionally, version control and bug tracking software was also used.

The final product was due at the end of the final semester before graduation and was displayed at Columbia College Chicago’s end of the year festival called Manifest.

Project Positions/Responsibilities:

Documentation Lead – I was in charge of pre-production documentation of all systems, UI, control, level design, game narrative, and asset tracking.

Scripting Lead – I coordinated 4 designers in charge of implementing gameplay features and systems that did not require engine alteration in Torque Game Engine Advanced.  Output included a team and class system, custom player weapons and abilities, UI, visual effects, sound, and animation scripting, and a variety of other scripting tasks.

Technology:

• Torque Game Engine Advanced
• Microsoft Sharepoint
• Microsoft Project
• BugTracker.NET
• TortoiseSVN
• Advanced Microsoft Word, Excel, other Office applications

Download Proposal Document (PDF)

Date of Creation: Spring 2008-Present

Description:

Project Gravity is a first-person puzzle platformer in which the player has control over the pull of gravity.  Firing a gun at a wall defines that surface at the ground, changing gravity’s pull and sending the player and any physics objects falling in that direction.  Using this mechanic, the player must navigate the game world and solve puzzles.

The original concept document was written in Spring 2008 for a document development class at Columbia College Chicago with Ben Cabot (original concept), Cynthia Miller, Zane Beyer, and Nick Moran.  More recently, Ben Cabot and I decided to pursue developing the idea as a Half Life 2 mod.

The above images are a proof of concept level inspired by M.C. Esher’s Relativity.  Stairs move in perpendicular angles to one another and the player must use their abilities to navigate to the exit of the level, which happens to be directly beneath the entrance.

Technology: Valve SourceSDK and Hammer

Play Simulation

Download Document (PDF)

Date of Creation: Spring 2007

Description:

LeafScape is a prototype simulation of the growth of trees over time given a specific climate.  It is intended to be used as a landscape planning tool, allowing the user to test specific species of trees in a specific climatic region to see how well they grow over time.  It tracks precipitation and temperature according to historic national averages.

The user is able to plant trees, change region and time, and check the “status” of their tree at any given time.  The user can see the tree’s species, age, height, current growth rate, ideal growth rate, suggested average precipitation, prime temperature range, current maximum size, prime maximum size, and any negative factors that might be influencing the tree.  Time constraints limited the complexity of the project, forcing me to disclude sun exposure as a factor in growth.

Technology: Javascript/Processing

Watch it in action!

Date of Creation: Spring 2008

Description:

In spring 2008, me and 7 other students accepted a proposal from the Game Club to create 9 original Portal levels for a tournament they were planning at the end of the semester.  We all came up with as many ideas as possible and paired them down to our top choices.  While most of us dabbled in every level, we were for the most part specifically in charge of one or two.

This is one of the two I was in charge of.  Called “Silos”, it is a tall chamber-like room with two silos in the center.  The exit is at the top of one of the silos and must be unlocked with a switch underneath the other silo.

Technology: Valve Source SDK Hammer

Watch it in action!

Date of Creation: Spring 2008

Description:

In spring 2008, I and 7 other students accepted a proposal from the Game Club to create 9 original Portal levels for a tournament they were planning at the end of the semester.  We all came up with as many ideas as possible and paired them down to our top choices.  While most of us dabbled in every level, we were for the most part specifically in charge of one or two.

This is one of the two I was in charge of.  “Barrels” adds an object that was not originally in Portal: exploding oil drums (hence the name).  You must light these barrels on fire and use them to shatter glass that is barring your path.

Technology: Valve Source SDK Hammer

Play Simulation

Date of Creation: Spring 2007

Description:

Field of Flowers is a NON-INTERACTIVE prototype emergent simulation of bees wandering a field of flowers, pollinating them.  When the simulation begins a random number of bees start in a field of a random number of different colored flowers.  The bees then wander around.  When they come into proximity of a flower, they land and gather pollen, then wander off.  If they happen to land on another flower of the same color, they will pollinate the flower, which will die off, and create seeds the blow away into the wind.  They eventually land and create several new flowers.  This project was meant to explore emergent systems.  I chose to explore this pollination concept to see how flora and fauna interact to create a varied and colorful prairie field.

Technology: Javascript/Processing

Download Document (PDF)

Date of Creation: Spring 2008

Description:

In this project, our goal was to come up with a game system fully document it.  We had to define quantitative data, consider balancing, and write with a focus functionality and implementation.  I chose to design an FPS game system wherein the player is allowed to shape shift.  I documented the abilities and character system, fleshing out the data and information required to implement the system.

Download Document (PDF)

Date of Creation: Spring 2007

Description:

H.E.L.P. was a grant project given to Columbia College Chicago by the city of Chicago to develop a product in the Unreal engine to simulate a building evacuation in the event of a fire.  In my C++ 2 class, our goal was to recreate as much of this simulation as possible in Torque Game Engine.  I was responsible for creating the entirety of the technical documentation for the project, which would instruct the programmers on what functionality needed to be implemented and a general overview of how it should be implemented.  This is the resulting documentation.