OVERVIEW

Retail Wars is a friendship-ruining 4 player couch competitive party game. Pickup and throw anything in the store to serve customers and knock out your friends in the fight to become the coveted employee of the month!

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MY ROLE - DESIGNER

My role on this project was as a project coordinator, technical designer, and marketer. I helped to keep the project on track, developed the level layouts and some of the game's code, as well as get our project into conventions (such as Powerhouse Late, OzComicCon, and PAX) and on platforms like Steam and Xbox. I was lucky enough to work with some highly talented individuals who all aided in making this product something worth being proud of.

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LESSONS LEARNED

By far the biggest mistake on this project was the misjudgement of the game's core loop and "fun". We spent literal months pouring over the design of 2 maps for the game's main mode, striving to create the perfect map. When we released the game, we realized players spent significantly more time in the open lobby arena (literally just a room with some furniture in it) than in the polished maps we made (by a factor of 2-3x!), just chucking items at each other and almost completely ignoring the maps made. This taught me 2 important lessons:

1. Don't get bogged down by the details of the task - take a step back and re-evaluate what you need to actually achieve.

   1. IE What is actually fun about the game? Does this mode service that?

2. Let people playtest the game in full, with no interference.​

   1. Because we ran very controlled playtesting sessions, we never got to experience what real-world users would actually do when we weren't there, and this skewed our judgement of what made the game fun.

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OVERVIEW

TritonVR is the first publicly available co-located multiplayer FPS game, where players movements are tracked 1:1 to provide an unparalleled VR experience – you’ll need to move in real life to move in the game

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MY ROLE - SOLO DEV

I did everything on this project, especially the Design and Programming aspects. Some aspects like the art and audio were purchased through the Marketplace, but most everything was created by me. This was a highly technical project, as this project involves:

• Global Online Multiplayer

  • Epic Online Services integration​

  • Crossplay between PC and Quest

  • Advanced Lag Compensation techniques to ensure smooth gameplay

• Co-Location

  • Creating the first public consumer co-located product​

  • Online and Local co-location supported

• AI

  • Using the Utility AI framework to create dynamic enemies that challenge the player with human-like decision making.

  • Gun parity between AI and Players​

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LESSONS LEARNED

This has been the longest game I've ever worked on, with over 3 years of development, and so there have been many lessons learnt during this project. I will quickly highlight 2 areas, but this section could be pages long:​

• Co-location Design Consideration

  • Designing for spaces as small as 3m*3m is challenging, especially where there are very few examples I can draw from! You will need to constantly go in-headset to confirm how the map plays.

  • One very cool aspect I learnt is that the length of a weapon is now a design consideration! For example, long weapons like snipers can't be used in close quarters due to their physical length, which provides a very unique design lever I can modify to balance the weapon economy.

• Code Matainence

  • Towards the end of the project, the codebase became very complex and tricky to maintain, which made it hard to release updates.​

  • In TritonVR 2, I have designed all the code to be as modular and maintainable as possible, which has lead to a much more stable product (analytics indicate that TVR 1 has around 10 crashes per 100 users, TVR 2 only has 2 crashes per 100 users)

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OVERVIEW

An educational FPS game designed for use in the classroom.

Created in Unity, the project is a singleplayer campaign mission where players fight in the Battle of Long Tan in the Vietnam War, with in-game events directly correlating to real-world events and the ability to control any soldier on the battlefield, both friendly and enemy.
 

MY ROLE - SOLO DEV

I did programming and design work on this game, with aspects like audio and art outsourced to the marketplace. I also created a 35,000 word portfolio which details every aspect of this game's development, which you can download in the "read more" section.

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LESSONS LEARNED

As detailed in the 35,000 word portfolio associated with this project, scope was the biggest issue. I was too busy on certain aspects (like the gunplay) that I neglected other key parts, like the story and mission flow. I tried to do too many aspects in such a short period of time that some parts were negleted significantly, and which resulted in a admittedly buggy final product. That being said, it was the longest Unity project I have worked on in my spare time, ​and taught me the advanced Unity knowledge I would need for Retail Wars and other Unity-based projects.

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OVERVIEW

Metal Mashers was an online, split screen-compatible racing game where players fought against each other with cars equipped with devastating weaponry.

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MY ROLE - SOLO DEV

I did programming and design work on this game, with aspects like audio and art outsourced to the marketplace. This was the first "Steam-ready" game I made, so lots of effort was placed in meta-level aspects like community building and market research.

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LESSONS LEARNED

This project taught me a very painful lesson about source control and backups. I was using the terminal to make a plugin for TritonVR, which inadvertedly deleted the entire desktop (including all the source files for Metal Mashers!). After losing dozens of hours of work on the latest update, I decided to switch to TritonVR full-time (which was a great decision in hindsight!) and I began keeping frequent backups of the project. 

This project also taught me about Unreal's networking system, which would go on to be the basis of knowledge for TritonVR's development. 

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OVERVIEW

Project: 42 is a simple, yet extremely fun web game – like SUPERHOT, time moves when the player does, however instead of a first-person perspective, a top-down perspective is used. Due to its simplicity, the game has an addictive nature, well-suited to the pick-up-and-play nature of HTML web games.

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MY ROLE - SOLO DEV

I did everything, including the art! The design for almost everything was inspired by the game Superhotline Miami. I loved that game so much that I wanted to try and re-create it in Unity for a Game Jam, and I kept expanding it out for a full release.​

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LESSONS LEARNED

This game wasn't meant to be a commercial hit, and it didn't recieve much attention on release, which is ok! I purely made it for experimentation purposes, for the love of the craft. I learnt alot about Unity, which helped with REAPERS later on.

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OVERVIEW

Pong Battle Royale was a game I used to learn about the process of game creation in Unity using the UNet multiplayer framework. The game is simplistic at its core, with a top-down perspective and few controls, which allows for a party-like pick-up-and-play feel and an extremely fun product to play with friends. The link attached is a "Reloaded" version, which has Online Multiplayer support (albeit with some lag due to most UNet servers being deprecated long ago).

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MY ROLE - SOLO DEV

I did everything, including the art. This was a project I did during school to learn, and it was my first full Unity game.​

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LESSONS LEARNED

This is a project I am rather fond of, due to the simplicity of the game! It's just move and shoot, and be the last one alive. Combined with the LAN multiplayer, it makes for an excellent game to play with classmates. My teachers really supported me with this project too by organizing playtesting sessions, which helped significantly in perfecting the casual gameplay loop. There are no features or mechanics which do not directly service the core gameplay (eg progression, rewards etc) - everything exists for the sole purpose of fun.​

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OVERVIEW

Project Tetra was the first game I ever made. This is an arena FPS complete with Battle Royale, Deathmatch and Zombies. It has a wide range of content and was quite successful at 12.8k downloads (especially for a first project!).

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MY ROLE - SOLO DEV

I did everything, and outsourced audio and art to the Marketplace. ​

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LESSONS LEARNED

This game gave me the basic understanding of game creation that I have used for every project I have ever done. The importance of this game in my career cannot be understated. This project taught me not only how to make games, but how to design them, market them and maintain them.​