Jimson and the Jazz Crabs is a simple adventure game created in the classic style of Sierra On-line. I started this game because I needed a project to keep busy while looking for a job after graduation. The game character Jimson is based on one of my roommates in college and the Jazz Crabs were inspired by a song titled “Jazz Crabs” by You Say Party! We Say Die!. The game was created in Adventure Game Studio since it would allow me to get right down to making the kind of a game I wanted.
Originally I began this project just to keep busy and entertain my roommates, but people who don’t even understand the inside jokes seem to enjoy the game. I stopped development when I first moved home, but one day I had an idea how to complete a quest line I’d been stuck on and sat down to add it into the game. A few days later I had finished the game and had a some friends test it out. Taking their feedback into account I streamlined the game so it made more sense and released a final version. I have to say the feedback from my initial version was key, without that I am sure many of the people who have played it since my final release would have gotten frustrated and not completed the game.
Happy Bunny Garden Panic is a 3D puzzle game created in C++ and OpenGL. I acted as the project manager, program architect and game designer on the project. Learn more and download Happy Bunny from the game page.
Newtonian Drop is a physics-based Source-Mod. Players navigate a science research center where they interact with with objects powered by the Havok physics engine. The intent of the project was to create an interactive illustration of basic physics principles.
The mod was created by a team of 5 students for our Building Virtial Worlds class.
I was primarily responsible for combining, texturing and polishing the individual exhibits into a single coherent environment. The greatest challenge of this project was the lack of fidelity and control over physics in Half-Life 2. The physics objects work well for the fast paced gameplay of death-match, but values such as fiction and gravity are not editable from within the level editor. This greatly limited which concepts we could successfully illustrate, but I feel the final product demonstrates the value of our original vision.
Vale of Tears is a small game I made with Matthew Hanns Schroeter for our Game Design class in Fall 2009. We have a very limited time to make the game as the focus was on testing the product. I did all of the coding and menu/background art, while Matt did all of the character design and animation work. We pitched the game as follows:
In a dystopian19th Century England, a novitiate of the Second Order with the passion for spiritual life is gifted with the ability to fly from the darkest areas of inter-natural communication. Left to test her strength of character against a ravaged landscape littered with temptation and sin, she must return to the cloister to prove that everybody – no matter how evil they are, can be saved.
The player assumes the control of Sister Clare, guiding her through the air to dodge and absorb helpful spirits who can be helpful. As she collects spirits, the sanctity of the cloister is re-enforced against the assault of evil. In the end she faces a minion of hell in a true test of her virtue.
We set out to make a game so dark and ridiculous that the serious subject matter could be taken lightly. I am not sure if achieved our objective, but the simple gameplay is entertaining for a weekend, and I enjoyed putting it together.
Suzy’s Curtain Call is an interactive storybook about the life and death of a young girl. The project was created for my first Visual Story class at the Centre for Digital Media during the Fall 2008 term. Suzy’s Curtain Call was the first time I took on the role of Producer in my graduate studies. I pitched the initial concept of a ruined carnival as the death-world for a little girl and formed a team around the idea. One of the biggest challenges of the project was the amount of art assets and the difference in style between the two artists on the team. One of my major responsibilities was working to integrate the two styles and ensuring characters and locations were recognizable when transitioning between the cut-paper look of the memories and the painted look of the death-world.
All of the memory art assets were created using hand drawn images which were then torn and scanned into Photoshop. I assisted in layering, coloring and finally assembling the individual objects into the scenes. For a number of the memory scenes I created the background image and edited the music selections.
The complicated art production process took far longer than we had originally estimated, causing the whole narrative to come together only at the last moment. I really wish we had been able to test the experience earlier because the final product is a bit confusing on first viewing. Small details we spent hours designing are not even noticed by users because we didn’t set them up correctly.
That said, of the team projects I have worked on, this probably reflects my own personal style the most and I am proud of what we accomplished. I hope someday to take the assets from this project and create a more interactive game experience.
The CG&FN for January 20th was Annie Hall. I selected this film not just because it is a classic, but because it is an extended rumination on love and what makes us happy in life, which are themes games almost never attempt to tackle. Despite the age of this film, I think almost everyone can relate or empathize with some part of Annie and Alvy’s relationship. The non-linear, often exagarated presentation of the narrative only makes the film more accurately reflect human experience, rather than being realistic, it represents reality. Ryan Nadel said it better last year in an article for our visual story class. [Link]
The CG&FN for January 13th was The Road Warrior. This film is interesting for a number of reasons, from stunt work to pacing, but I wanted to focus on how George Miller creates a post-apocalyptic mythology. To focus our attention I created a simple worksheet outlining the stages of Joseph Cambell’s Monomyth. I hadn’t gone through the film looking for parts of the Hero’s Journey before, but as a group we found elements of almost every stage. Download the sheet and try it yourself!
I began gaming in the early 90's during the heyday of PC shareware gaming. Somewhere during my Computer Science undergraduate studies I became interested not just in playing games, but creating them as well. I completed my Masters of Digital Media degree at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver, B.C. I am now a level designer at Visceral Games
Altereddreams.net is my online notebook and portfolio. Here you will find my thoughts and presentations on gaming as well as the projects I have worked on during my studies.
