So, a lot has changed since I first started this website, and it is enough to warrant a development update series about myself and projects I am working on. Welcome to Developer Update 1.
It has now been 2 months since I graduated from UC Irvine’s Computer Game Science program with a minor in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. As such, I am currently in the process of looking for a game development job, either as a gameplay programmer, game designer, or quality assurance tester. In the meantime, I am taking an online class on Udemy to learn Unreal 4, and I have also started work on several small projects, including Project FireLight and Project Color Breaker.
Project FireLight is a top-down dungeon crawler where I could practice some player and enemy gameplay programming. In its current state, the player can navigate a series of rooms and fight enemy ghosts by firing projectiles or doing melee damage. I’ve spent some time working on the enemy AI scripting for general movement and player detection. Each enemy cycles between different sentry positions, which are interrupted if they catch sight of the player. If they lose sight of the player, which occurs when the player moves beyond their sight range or outside of their field of view, the enemy will wait a few seconds before returning to their sentry pathing.
Project Color Breaker is a 3D mobile game where players tap the screen to change their color in order to pass through barriers. Players much match the barrier color in order to proceed. The goal here was to make a game centered around one single form of input, tapping on the screen. The level is procedurally generated as the player moves throughout the level, with the goal of becoming increasingly difficult the further the player progresses (increasing difficulty is the next part of the procedural generation to work on). I am currently targeting an Android release on the Google Play Store sometime in the near future as this project develops.
Besides eventual release, Project Color Breaker has a few elements I wanted to develop skills in. First, procedural generation is something that I wanted to play around with as opposed to making individual levels (there would not be enough time to anyway). Second, I am trying to stress architecture hierarchy in programming this project. Some of my previous projects have been a tangled web of dependencies between scripts, which is something I am aiming to avoid here. This has been a good challenge that has forced me to refactor code often to keep things mostly pulling from the game manager and nothing else if possible. Finally, as this project is set for mobile release, I wanted to try out Unity’s lightweight render pipeline. While I have not done too much with visual effects yet, this presented challenges in dealing with the new type of materials in script. There are a few more development aspects I am hoping to learn through this project, but those will be mentioned in a later update once they are implemented.
Beyond starting some small side projects, the portfolio website has undergone some changes recently. Descriptions for all of my previous projects have been updated to be more concise. In addition, most of them now have videos depicting gameplay up on my YouTube channel. Right now, the channel is being used as a place to show off completed or prototype games, but it I may start including regular development updates there as well.
Also new to the website are the game design documents and projects in progress pages. The documents are samples of my design work done for either job applications, previous projects, or as portfolio pieces. As of right now, there is only a technical design sample from a recent application uploaded, but more will be coming in the future. Projects in progress is where any new or smaller game projects will go when they are just starting out or do not have enough content to warrant their own page. This page should change regularly as new games are added and polished games are moved to their own portfolio entries.
Finally, I expect to be more active on this blog in the future, containing development updates like this one in addition to discussions on general game development and design. Thanks for stopping by, and keep an eye out as things continue to be updated in the coming weeks.