Games

Posts regarding any games, game mechanics or game design work that I’ve worked on.

How to make state machines in blueprint

Finite State Machines are invaluable design patterns for video games. Knowing this, I was quite surprised at the lack of resources specifically focused on creating state machines with blueprints in Unreal. Most information that you’ll find online will relate to animation management, but state machines have much more applications than that! This tutorial explores breaking things down into states, some essential features, and blueprint implementation methods used in my own project…

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2D ram animation and shader design

In my last post, I mentioned that I would create a character. Now I’m happy to share my process of designing the new ram character in my game, creating a shader material to texture it, and bringing it to life with animation. I approached the deign on this character in a similar way to how I approach logo design. I was taught about the idea of visual puns in logos, where you take two or more unrelated ideas and bring them together in a clever way…

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Expanding gameplay upon the core

Since my last update of my endless runner game, I expanded the main mechanics with a charge ability to smash through new breakable boxes spawned on top of the platforms, and added an automatic slowdown ability to help with survivability. I also created an editor function in Unreal to assist me in visualizing the spawn sequences of the platforms as the complexity of designing them increased. A bunch of new visuals and sound effects were finally added to enhance the experience of the game. Starting with a breakable box prototype I introduced the breakable boxes in my game to provide…

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A unique elevator loader

One of the core features of my experimental first-person adventure puzzle game that I’m developing is a world loading mechanic that uses an elevator as the main hub. This is the first feature that I’ve implemented to test how it works since it’s quite central to the overall experience. A simple level loader may not seem that interesting or important at first, but this elevator is a bit different than the typical ones that you’d see in a game…

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Controlled randomness in endless runners

I’ve been working on an endless runner in Unreal where the main control utilizes the rotation of a mouse scroll wheel or touch-drag movement to move platforms and bridge your character through the course. One thing I noticed right away through prototyping was that true randomness was not fun at all and just seemed hectic and frustrating while also being hard to calculate the possible paths that the player can accomplish. I’d never want the player to feel like there was no way to continue in their run because a block was impossibly far, that’s a great way to get…

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Rocket Defense

I added a page for a game called Rocket Defense in the portfolio section. The page highlights many UI concepts, 2D vector art with animations and descriptions of my goals and process for the concepts. The game was slated for release on the iPad in a collaboration with Dark Acre. As a first time developing for iPad, it was an interesting experience working with such different controls and designing a UI that fits it best. Please check out the page and have a look!

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Resident Evil

Lately I had the pleasure to work at Slant Six Games on Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City in a Design Support position. It was my fist venture in a AAA environment so it was quite an interesting and exciting experience for me. In my role, I worked closely with the lead designers and scripters to create level content for the game. My work included pickup placement and balancing in multiplayer, cover volume placement, intel collectable placement in campaign levels, scripting in multiplayer, and testing and giving feedback to the scripters and designers. One challenge was to balance multiplayer levels to…

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Making of Tris

Main Menu of Tris

Tris is a forever-runner flash game created in collaboration with Nick Yonge. In Tris you control a shape changing “Tri” that can be pulled to become fast and streamlined or squished to expand like a parachute and slow down. You have to use this ability to survive and gain more points as you’re flying though a randomly generated world. My largest contribution to the project was creating the random block generator that can range from being difficult to easy while keeping a constant path for the player. My process was first creating a static one to see how complicated it…

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