Flagship game (pre-prototype phase)
Your birthright is a life-changing adventure to climb a shapeshifting castle, ascend the throne, and harness its power.
Your fate is intertwined with the sentient castle, and as it begins to fall apart, you must stop at nothing to reach the top of the tallest tower, where the mysterious key to your mutual survival awaits.
The climb upwards is gated behind the dimensional doors of the castle, which transport you to the surreal worlds outside - places and times which you could never have predicted you would visit.
For both of you to survive, you cannot go back, only forward.
Other game prototypes and projects
The Inner Island is a recreation of the calming mental retreat that I created for myself through meditation, where I could escape depression, gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia. I wanted to share it so that it might bring some peace and meditative sanctuary to others, too. I made this game as part of a 1-week challenge for myself. It's a simple experience where you collect books full of notes that I have left for you on a pleasant island. The notes are delivered through simple voiceovers by myself.
Outback Breakout is a combination horde shooter & bar-management crossover. A group assignment for year 1 at the Academy of Interactive Entertainment, Outback Breakout is the culmination of the work of nearly 20 people, planned and built over around 3 months. I was the team lead for 5 programmers for this project, and I myself was the programmer for the user interface for the game.
Potion Shopkeeper is a combination user interface, user input system, and cross-platform proof of concept I made for my programming Diploma. Pick up ingredients and turn them into potions, before giving the right potion to an NPC.
Hunker Down is a group project virtual reality prototype during my Advanced Diploma at the Academy of Interactive Entertainment, Canberra, Australia.
Drones advance on your bunker in waves, both on the ground and in the air, and you must destroy them with the weapons in the bunker before they reach you.
Players manage the timing of reloads to outpace the speed of the drones as they advance on you in 10 waves, with the player scoring a point for every drone destroyed.
Unreal Engine FPS Demo
My first Unreal Engine Blueprint project, this demonstrates:
A customised controller with sprinting and optical zoom.
A Widget-bsed user interface facilitated by the HUD.
NPCs controlled by AI Controllers and Blackboards.
Game progression controlled by score derived from defeating enemies.
Dynamic material selection by the user which is applied to NPCs according to their Behaviour Tree state, including saving player choices on save and load.
Complex post-processing outline shader that accounts for thickness by distance; removal of artifacts generated by angular grazing; individual colour assignment per NPC if desired through use of the stencil buffer; outlines on both the outermost edge of the mesh and the interior of the mesh; variable emissive intensity and colouring; and more!
Classic toon shading.
Enum-driven animation triggered by Widgets.
Use of event-driven programming and interface relationships between Blueprints.
Unreal Engine Complex Dialogue System
I built a modular complex dialogue management system using Unreal Engine’s Blueprint system, which I will distribute for free once it is complete.
This system provides a dynamic ‘conversation’ management system for a user who has a standard Act/Scene/Line script, enabling them to trigger text dialogue on the user interface, synchronised with the timing and duration of audio clips in 2D or 3D audio (at the location of an actor or as a global voiceover) according to who is speaking, and the animations the user has associated with the dialogue. Individual actors in the scene may have their own personalised widgets including branded colours, aliases, fonts, and so on.
The conversation system permits any given line of dialogue from a user’s script to be referenced anywhere in the game, by any actor, and the appropriate speaker (per the script) will be given the audio and dialogue they need. Individual instances of a line of dialogue may be contextualised as either a question with a set of possible player responses defined by the user, or a statemente which will simply progress the dialogue to the next line in the conversation, whoever’s line that may be. Questions dynamically populate the user interface with buttons that a player can select, which in turn dynamically steer the conversation according to the logic the user wants the script to follow.
This system is made modular through use of Blueprint Actor Components that can simply be dragged and dropped onto their own characters, and does not couple itself with systems that a user might wish to use to trigger the dialogue system. Whilst a user must necessarily provide the raw data in their script, and the logic flow of the conversations they wish to be present in the game, this is a matter of filling out data tables and enumerators, and does not require C++ coding. The entire system is driven by two simple interface calls to start and end conversations, subject to the game logic the user wishes to implement (eg collision boxes, points or score, by timer, etc).
This system is driven by events, interfaces, data tables, structs, enumerators and soft object references which are only loaded when needed.
I have created a comprehensive tutorial on the system’s structure, setup and use.