AJJMCC

For Brackeys 2022.2 I pulled together a team of 6 amongst coworkers as a team building exercise. A functional and cohesive idle game with an exploratory element.

Beyond being anyone in the teams first attempt at an idle game, 1,000.000 clicks from home was personally an exercise in writing. Specifically writing small quips and dialogue for in-game events.

Following the theme of “It is not real” we chose to parody the popular American counter-protest “Birds aren’t real”. This game was produced amidst the Brisbane floods which affected 3/4 team members. I am incredibly happy to have actually produced what could be dubiously called a finished jam game. The ultimate and often un-reached goal of any jam.

This game went on to achieve a top 5% overall score out of 1600 entries. An improved version is currently in the works

My first attempt at a horror game, and in 48 hours to boot. However I believe we created a solid atmosphere dipping into the analog horror concepts with our text crawl intro. As well as creating a proper sense of urgency in our chasing player duplicate.

This game tracks player movement and has a clone spawned that will follow their path, forcing them to take different routes to the same goal through multiple runs lest they come across another version of themselves (see the Mandala catalogue for our main inspiration)

As a result of the level layout having set points that must be reached in order, this project did end up producing a tangible sense of urgent fear even though the enemies movement is entirely known. Players know the enemy is “chasing” them through the level and that there is effectively a timer wherein they must reach certain spots before the enemy does while avoiding their own path

In this puzzle shooter the player is encouraged to co-operate with themselves ‘Braid’ style to solve a series to top down puzzles intended to show the extend of the main mechanics possibilities as well as slowly build up mechanical skill in the players.

This is a game that I will be turning into a fully fledged Steam title. The itch.io version should be considered a technical demo.

As a university capstone project, I delved into VR and formed a team around that goal specifically because I had never touched it before. To learn new technology and design constraints.

This project had two specific design goals. Provide a VR experience which diegetically contextualizes every aspect of movement. Resulting in minimal motion sickness or headache, luckily our university environment had many subjects for testing, as well I myself having only 1.1 working eyes am often a good tester for these sorts of deals. We had no tester report sickness after our final movement scheme was applied.

The second goal ties in to the first. VR does not do legs. Instead of designing a work around, my design started with this in mind. Seating the player down to match their mech suit seat and making all shooting and movement options physical in world objects laid out for player interaction. This means that there is less obfuscation between the control scheme and in world action. In GC:SO the player does not press a controller button to jump jet to a new position, they grab the laser guider and choose a point then pull the trigger. of said guider to begin the process.

I believe VRs best quality is not immersion, but feel. The ability to ‘surround project’ a feeling into a users interactive experience.

Gone Crab was a university game made in two weeks. Twisting the concept of “home” to an active search for constant change instead of the often sedentary concepts that come to mind. I have no idea why, but this game still gets downloads daily. It is not very good and it is 5 years old.

With that said I believe we did successfully create a real “wow” moment, with a crab constantly increasing in size needing new shells, the moment where players loop around to the starting area and get a chance to see how far they have come and how much they have grown provided an excellent feeling of achievement.

Happy place was an experiment in using a virtual space to manifest the concerns or obsessions that can be generated inside the minds of people who may have obsessive tendencies. Taken from experiences relayed to me by those I know personally. This was my attempt to translate their everyday headspace into an interactive environment.

Happy Place is a personal achievement because with such minimal content, an evocative nightmare was born. Both pickups have different control systems, some things work perfectly, some don’t some cant even be interacted with.

A set of small games made in a day or so each to test out different input methods.

PRETZEL uses the numpad in combination with WASD to control a set of shields around the player character. Esssentially ‘pretzeling’ your hand. As well every press of the middle key (5) zooms the camera in. The prototype showed promise and I believe it could be moved into a small title.

WHY is a project designed to test player accuracy with the mouse. It was also a programming challenge to turn a set of animation curves into dynamically increasing difficulty. The experiences learnt making WHY transitioned into Rotator Redux.