Projects
Nocturnum (2021-2022)
Nocturnum
Nocturnum is a roguelike, third-person shooter where the player needs to explore an abandoned hotel and fight strange creatures to escape from a seemingly never-ending nightmare.
Each floor's layout is randomized when the game starts, which gives the player a different experience each time they play.
One of the game's main features is its weapon mod mechanic, allowing the player to alter the properties of and grant new abilities to their weapons to make combat fun and engaging.
Along the way, the player can find mods and other upgrades by clearing rooms, which helps the player survive against their shadowy foes.
I served as the project's team lead, coordinating the team's tasks and responsibilities and making sure documentation was kept up to date.
On the project, I focused on creating the player character, implementing their basic abilities and interactions, as well as entities that affect them, like pickups and upgrades.
I designed and implemented the game's entire UI, such as menus and navigation, item prompts, and the player's HUD.
Throughout the project I also worked on countless fixes and improvements for other areas of the game, including weapons, enemies, and progression between floors.
Development: August 2021—May 2022
Engine and Tools: Unreal Engine 4, Unreal Blueprints, C++, Perforce
View the game on Itch.io!
Mispel (2022)
Mispel
Mispel is a 2D action platformer where the player needs to defeat enemies and explore a hostile world in order to find the truth behind what they really are.
By using direction-based attacks to fight stronger opponents, players can add other characters' powers to their own, giving them new options in combat and more areas to explore.
Players can engage with the game's story as much or as little as they want through optional conversations at checkpoints, allowing players to tailor the game's experience to their own tastes.
Since Mispel was an existing project before I joined the team, I spent the beginning of the project familiarizing myself with their codebase and learning about their development projcess.
Afterward, I focused on updating the game's dialogue system to be more consistent and expandable, such as creating a manager to handle all dialogue-related tasks, allowing dialogue to be triggered in more places, and writing dialogue that matched the team's view of the game's story.
I also worked on bug fixes and improvements to other areas of the game to make it feel more polished, including the UI, checkpoint system, and character physics.
Development: January 2022—May 2022
Engine and Tools: Unity Engine, C#, GitHub
Azrael's Journey (2021)
Azrael's Journey
Azrael's Journey is a small prototype for a dungeon crawler I'm planning to make based on The Legend of Zelda series.
In this prototype, the player is tasked with fighting enemies and exploring a dungeon in order to find keys to progress further in the dungeon.
After unlocking the final door, the player must defeat a boss to reach the end of the dungeon.
The player has several different abilities, including a melee attack, ranged attack, charge attack, and block.
I made the base prototype in around a week, including the player, enemies, pickups, UI, and room lock system.
I also made the game's art assets, editing sprites to use for the characters, UI, and tiles.
After the prototype was finished, I went back and designed audio for the game, editing sounds and adding them to the game using FMOD.
Development: February 2021—May 2021
Engine and Tools: Unity Engine, C#, FMOD
View the game on Itch.io!
Daydream (2021)
Daydream
Daydream is a short, first-person game that requires the player to find their way through a maze of trees to reach a temple before time runs out.
Over time, the player's memory of the path through the forest fades. If the memory fades entirely, they will be unable to find the temple and lose the game.
By photographing landmarks in the forest, they will regain a small amount of memory of the path to help them make it through the maze.
Daydream was made for the Global Game Jam 2021 with a team of students from both America and Japan.
I served as the team's leader and organizer, planning our development schedule and communicating with other team members to determine what tasks each person should work on.
In the project, I focused on implementing the player, including basic movement, the memory and photographing mechanics, and implementing audio.
After the other team members had completed their areas of the game, I integrated each team member's work into a single product, such as menus, win and loss conditions, and the main level.
Development: January 2021
Engine and Tools: Unreal Engine 4, Unreal Blueprints
View the game on the Global Game Jam website!
Mirage (2020)
Mirage
Mirage is a first-person exploration game that asks the player to closely examine their surroundings to solve puzzles.
The game's main mechanic involves the player picking up and inspecting objects, which allows the player to find clues hidden in their environment.
The game's protagonist lives with schizophrenia, so many of its puzzles involve symptoms of the disease, such as auditory hallucinations that tell the player where to go or the appearance of shadowy figures that don't really exist.
I acted as the lead and organizer for the team, performing tasks like planning meetings, ensuring deadlines were met, and making sure documentation was kept up to date.
I also served as the team's primary researcher, studying schizophrenia and its symptoms to prevent our game from misrepresenting the disorder.
In the actual project, I started by programming the base player controls, such as movement and camera controls.
After that was finished, I worked on implementing the game's UI, including menus and navigation, interaction prompts, and any audio related to the UI.
Development: September 2020—December 2020
Engine and Tools: Unity Engine, C#, GitHub, FMOD
Potion Papa (2020)
Potion Papa
Potion Papa is a point-and-click puzzle game where the player needs to combine ingredients to brew various potions.
For each level, the player will be given a mission that requires them to make a certain potion.
Looking through the Potion Encyclopedia will give the player hints toward what type of ingredients the potion is made from.
Once the player is happy with the potion they've made, they can set out for their mission to see if they made the right one and completed the level.
I implemented the majority of the game's UI, including the game's menus, navigation, and interactable objects.
I also designed the aesthetics of the game using free assets and added audio to make the game more engaging.
Toward the end of the project, I made several improvements to the game's potion brewing system, giving the player more control over when and how they can combine ingredients.
Development: November 2020—December 2020
Engine and Tools: Unity Engine, C#, GitHub
E.T. for the A.T.A.R.I. (2020)
E.T. for the A.T.A.R.I.
E.T. for the A.T.A.R.I. is a casual puzzle game that requires the player to build forts to protect a magic orb from invaders.
The player starts each level with a certain amount of components they can use to build blocks, with each material being strong or weak against different enemy projectiles.
They have a short amount of time to build a fort to protect the orb before the enemy's trebuchets begin to fire.
If the orb survives the assault, the player wins the level.
I designed and implemented the game's entire UI, including its menus, navigation, and HUD.
I also worked on the game's aesthetics, using a combination of free assets and handmade sprites for its visual design, and adding audio to enhance the game's atmosphere.
After finishing my main tasks for the project, I spent the rest of the project fixing bugs and making other improvements in order to give the game a more complete feeling.
Development: October 2020
Engine and Tools: Unity Engine, C#, GitHub
Reaching Out (2020)
Reaching Out
Reaching Out is a short, top-down RPG that involves completing tasks to help your neighbors during a pandemic.
These tasks involve things like bringing them groceries, helping light the area around their home, or bringing a letter to someone's grandparents.
By staying in touch and helping others out in a time of need, it shows the player that connection is still important when people are separated by factors outside their control.
Reaching Out was made for IndieCade's Jamming the Curve game jam, where it won an Honorable Mention for the Prosocial Pandemic Behavior category.
I served as one of the team's leaders, planning meetings and helping determine which parts of the game each team member should work on.
I originally worked on programming characters with a simple AI that allowed them to move around and seek the player.
However, halfway through the project, we had to change our game's design greatly due to external circumstances.
After this change, I worked on drawing pixel sprites for the game's objects, including things like buildings, lamps, rocks, and foliage.
Development: September 2020
Engine and Tools: Unity Engine, C#, GitHub
View the game on Itch.io!
3D Visualizer (2020)
3D Visualizer
3D Visualizer is a web program that uses data sampled from an audio file to draw a 3D-looking shape on the screen.
The visualizer offers several different shapes for the user to choose from, including a cube, wave, cylinder, and cone.
The user can also choose to play one of five included audio files, or upload one of their own.
I built the visualizer by expanding previous Canvas projects I had worked on, using mathematical formulas and layering to draw 3D-looking shapes in a 2D space.
I also added logic to improve the various shapes' appearances, like stretching lines horizontally to give round shapes perspective or allowing them to rotate.
I included a menu that allows the user to change various settings for the visualizer, including the current shape, display color, or volume.
Development: March 2020—April 2020
Engine and Tools: JavaScript, Canvas API, Web Audio API
Dungeon Descent (2019)
Dungeon Descent
Dungeon Descent is a simple, arcade-style web game that tasks the player with collecting gems while avoiding monsters that roam around the room.
Once the player collects all the gems on a floor, a staircase is revealed that allows them to descend to the next floor.
If a monster sees the player, it will begin to chase them until they hide in one of the crates around the room.
The game's floors are procedurally generated, so each playthrough will be a unique experience.
I programmed the entire game, including player input, enemy states, collisions, and the randomized floor generation.
I designed the game's aesthetics too, using the PixiJS library to display simple pixel sprites and animations that I had drawn.
I also used the Howler.js library to add sound to the game in order to improve its overall experience.
Development: November 2019—December 2019
Engine and Tools: JavaScript, PixiJS, Howler.js
Spooked (2019)
Spooked
Spooked is a short, 2D platformer that tasks the player with defeating ghosts in order to escape from a haunted castle.
After the player defeats all the ghosts in a room, a door will open that allows them to progress to the next room.
The player's health is represented by a meter known as the Spookometer, which fills with both damage and time.
As the Spookometer fills, the player gains new attacks and abilities, but if the meter fills up completely, they will be defeated.
I mainly worked on implementing the player, including movement, physics, collisions, and animations.
I also programmed the majority of the main game loop, such as handling collisions between game objects and updating the current game and player states.
Toward the end of the project, I focused on fixing bugs and improving the game's balance to make it more fun for players.
Development: February 2019—April 2019
Engine and Tools: MonoGame, C#, GitLab