Projects

PROMOD is a 5v5 tactical FPS – Outthink, Outmaneuver and Outgun your opponents in constantly evolving explosive gameplay, handcrafted using the blueprints of old school shooters. Lock & load into the most explosive down the barrel experience and become UNSTOPPABLE.

I am currently working on PROMOD as a Junior Programmer at Bulkhead Interactive.

My responsibilities thus far have included working on: Core Gameplay Features, UI and Supporting Systems, a lot of which require constant and direct communication with lead designers and high levels of “tweakability” for ease of change post-implementation.

Big Bad Bunnies From Another Dimension (BBBFAD) is a 4 player, couch co-op shooter based on the concept that teamwork is fun, but not essential.

Working with most of the team from Mira’s Tale, BBBFAD was concepted, developed, tested and presented in the space of 12 weeks for a final year Team Project module.

Continuing a partnership with the skilled blueprinter from Mira’s Tale, we refined our co-operation so that I would focus on developing supporting systems that allowed him to iterate rapidly over new content. The best example of this is in the “Chaos Cards” and “Player Ability” systems. Creating the core backend for these in C++ with implementable events allowed him to create new gameplay rapidly.

Alongside this, I used my technical and mathematical knowledge to create a parameter based weapons system, 3 separate, fully balanced progression modes for the rounds & spawning, and figure out that a single checkbox in Unreal’s navmesh can break the entire thing cause a lot of problems.

BBBFAD won 1st place in both Game Art & Animation, and Game Design, with 3rd place in Best Team at the Games Republic Student Showcase 2021. It also reached the final stage of The Rookies 2021, and was featured in the Unreal Engine Fall 2021 Student Showcase

Mira’s Tale is a 3D platformer developed during my time at Canalside Studios.

I was the only programmer in the team of 7 designers. With one of them being a skilled blueprinter, we collaborated heavily to produce all of the technical requirements for the game.

As a result, I had the chance to work on numerous systems in both blueprints and C++, including: Grapple Hook, Gliding & Climbing Mechanics, Quest & Dialogue System, Save System, NPC System, Controller Support for Menus.

Alongside this, I set up and managed our Perforce depot, ensuring a smooth transition to remote working for all involved when the March national lockdown came into force. (Due to using perforce, displaying code samples/work/repositories is difficult, however I am completely open to sharing samples on request).

I took an active role in the creative aspects and the design of the project, and took on team lead & administration duties, alongside driving our social media accounts and Steam page to get the game noticed.

The most notable benefit of this work was communication that led to collaboration with a sound designer and a composer, something that we would not have been able to achieve otherwise.

Over the course of the 12 month placement, I was fortunate enough to work on almost every area of the game development process – Something that has equipped me with a wide knowledge of the games industry in the UK.

I am currently still working on Mira’s Tale and co-ordinating a devolved team to prepare for release as soon as possible.

Space Cubes! is a simple endless runner game set in the mysterious world of the Space Cubes^TM.

Built from the basic PyOpenGL with PyGame tutorial series, the application is intended as a demonstration of OpenCV capabilities applied to Human-Computer Interfaces for games.

Following established principles, the image processing uses HSV skin sampling, thresholding, background removal, face detection and contour tracking to follow the position of the user’s hand, converting that to movement information.

Most important lesson learned?
Webcams that you can’t disable auto-exposure for are not good for computer vision projects!

For Your Eyes Only is a simple stealth 3rd person stealth game created in Unreal with C++, developed over the course of 70 hours for the Grads In Games Search For A Star Competition 2021.

The showcase includes: Easy to set up AI guards following placed waypoints & Cameras looking at placed points. Player detection using the AIPerception system. GameState interaction by the Top Secret Documents and the maze entrances and exits.

Built from a template project containing a maze generator, my largest development pillar was to make any (potentially randomly) generated maze simple to mould into a level for the game. To this end, every mechanic I created (with content designers in mind) is easy to place, including the maze entrances and exits, the Top Secret Documents, guards, and security cameras.

I am quite proud of the vents in the game, which use an occlusion material to automatically cut the required holes in the meshes of the maze walls with no extra effort needed from a map designer.

The project, along with the C++ code test taken, qualified me for a finalist spot in SFAS, something that I declined due to having already signed a contract to work with Bulkhead Interactive.

My Final Year Project (Dissertation) was focused around constructing the basis for a tool to apply adaptive programming concepts to the construction and adaptation of games mechanics, similar to how ScriptEase did for Neverwinter Nights.

The tool is intended to take the form of an Unreal Engine Plugin to use the Unreal Engine JSON utilities in parsing schema’d JSON/XML files to dynamically generate and make alterations to C++ classes, restarting the editor to have these appear in a single button press. Mechanics are constructed from a pre-written collection of mechanic classes, designed to utilize features of Unreal Engine in the most correct way possible.

The final project report details a partial implementation of a developed process to logically deduce intent from the JSON format developed to describe gameplay mechanics. The full implementation was far out of scope of a final year project, however serves as the foundation for future research into a tool of this nature.