Games
Microgestures
2024 Ultraleap Windows/Android VR Programmer
One of our next-generation hand tracking platform showcase demos: high fidelity microgestures.
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Aurora
2023 Ultraleap Windows/Android VR Programmer
One demo to bring together the best Leap Motion & Ultraleap XR hand interactions.
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Ultraleap Launcher
2022 Ultraleap Windows/Android VR Lead Programmer
An XR application launcher with hands-first interaction for Ultraleap's Gemini showcase.
Read more...The Ultraleap Launcher was a project I led from its initial prototypes as an application launcher for the Lynx HMD, through to its final releases as our own showcase for the best practices when performing XR UI interaction.
The project went through many iterations internally before we landed on its final revision - that being the results of hundreds of refinements from various rounds of user testing conducted by our experience design team.
When it eventually launched alongside Gemini (V5 hand tracking) it was the showcase demo for all marketing material and was sent out to a series of influencers. Since then, the project has been taken to a wide range of trade shows including; GDC, AWE, CES, IAAPA (among others), where it has received high praise from companies such as Qualcomm and Pico.
Check out my LinkedIn to see some more photos of it in action!
Press Release Laval Virtual Demo
Blocks
2021 Ultraleap Windows/Android VR Lead Programmer
Ultraleap's flagship demo: create blocks, icospheres, and rectangles with your hands!
Download Blocks
i-Patch Pirates
2020 PlayWest Android/WebGL Tools & Systems Programmer
A large project encompassing minigames about cybersecurity for Android, web, and arcade.
Read more...i-Patch Pirates was my first shipped title at PlayWest, a games studio operated by UWE Bristol. The game was funded by UWE IT Services and aimed to promote cyber security to students and staff across both UWE campuses. I joined the project around two months before the ship date and helped push it through multiple major milestones and presentations.
My responsibilities for the project were to implement several key new systems such as achievements, tutorials, anti-cheat, and an arcade login. I also worked across the project fixing miscellaneous bugs as they arose, tidying older systems for modular use, and updating the older UI to use animators. As well as this I created the promotional trailer and splash for our WebGL build.
I was also in charge of creating a locker hacking minigame which had players guess part of a player's login code in order to break into that player's locker and steal their gold or buried treasure location. If a buried treasure location was found, it would be marked on the world map and players could explore to find it. Upon finding the treasure location the player had a chance to dig it up by playing a gem matching minigame. The aim of the locker hacking was to encourage players to pick stronger passwords and change them regularly.
Pirates shipped openly to 30k staff and students at UWE Bristol for their Cyber Security Week - available on Android, WebGL, and arcade machines on campus.
Following shipping to UWE, we secured a deal with Bristol Airport, and I was a part of the presentations to trial Pirates within the airport's offices. This trial led to securing funding for a Pirates redesign, focussing on security issues at the airport, for use in staff training, to be launched as a new title. This was also later followed up by multiple other locations, such as Gatwick.
Unfortunately due to the Coronavirus pandemic, these projects are currently on hold.
Download for Android Play Online
Don't Walk By
2020 PlayWest Windows/WebGL Tools & Systems Programmer
A hazard management game utilising Lemmings style AI behaviours.
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Don't Walk By is a hazard management game utilising Lemmings style AI behaviours. Players direct "peeps" around a level utilising various abilities available to them, with the aim of avoiding hazards in the environment.
For the project I developed a bespoke suite of internal content management tools using WinForms, as well as the game's level population system and a user-facing level editor inside of the shipped game.
The game started life as a university project and was quickly taken over by PlayWest to bring to release.
After the game's release, I worked on tidying and upgrading the backend tools and systems. Part of this process involved porting the project to WebGL to serve as a basis for PlayWest's next title, Infiltrators.
The game can be downloaded from the link below, along with a repo hosting the source code for our internal tools and the game's level system - all of which I developed, and have permission to share!
Tools Source Download Game
Polygon Fitness
2020 PlayWest Windows Lead Programmer
A game featuring integration with rowing machines which tracks stats to a public API.
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Polygon Fitness was a game I rapidly developed over a couple of weeks alongside a 3D artist at PlayWest. The game connects to two rowing machines using an old API which I wrote a wrapper for to work in Unity. The project was commissioned by UWE Bristol for the national Row Britannia event, to encourage students to take part. As you row through the game you are taken past several landmarks from Bristol. Stats are tracked and logged to a server, which displays infographics on a public website.
When the game was finished, UWE placed it in their lobby for students to use, and I provided live service updates to fix issues remotely. The game attracted attention from press and the organisers of the Row Britannia event, with a very positive reception.
Unfortunately the event was called off early due to the Coronavirus outbreak in March 2020.
No public build is available due to the requirement of the rowing machines to use the game, however a video will be recorded when I'm allowed back on site after lockdown!
A Knightly Heist
2020 Uni Project Windows Systems Programmer
A game where you play as a time travelling knight stealing artefacts from a museum.
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Created in a team of six over a few days, this game places you in the role of a knight who has travelled into the future to steal artefacts from a museum.
The aim of the game is to collect as many artefacts as possible and escape back through the portal before you're caught by the guards.
This project was developed in just over a week as a game jam in a team of 6.
Download View Source on GitHub
Mario Kart DX12
2019 Uni Project Windows Tools & Systems Programmer
A recreation of Mario Kart within DirectX12 with a fully custom engine pipeline.
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This was a project in a team of 4 to create an engine framework capable of running a Mario Kart style game, utilising DirectX12. The final engine and Mario Kart based game came together quite nicely over a few months of work.
The main focus of this project was building the engine, so a significant focus was placed on producing reuseable systems rather than bespoke functionality for the Mario Kart project. We created a number of systems for physics, audio, asset management, and more - all of which are non-specific to the Mario Kart game and could allow the engine to be easily repurposed for another title.
The core of the engine backend relies on a toolkit which allows access to most of the engine's core features through a GUI with a range of functionalities for asset importing (models/sounds/images/etc), configuration customisation (fonts/keybinds/cameras/glyphs), and a series of other things. We also embedded some more bespoke features into the engine toolkit, for example, item configurations.
Our asset pipeline was developed around a system I referred to as "asset comps": the idea of importing a series of assets which build up a compilation for a specific use. This "use" was then read-in by the engine itself to provide the assets for a certain entity. For example, a character would have a comp which specified its model, sounds, name, and more. When an asset is assigned to a comp it is tagged - asset tagging became useful to prevent the deletion of in-use assets, and also would be useful for releasing a project and making sure it does not ship with any development (or upcoming) assets.
Levels are created for the engine through Blender, which utilises our own plugin that I developed for placing points in the world representing collision volumes (for lap checkpoints), item boxes, and more. This is a nice graphical way of adding entities within the map without using magic numbers. A level in the engine is built up by one or two models, one model supporting mesh collision, and the other being effectively background scenery. This was implemented later in development as we reached memory caps with larger levels as just one SDKMESH.
The engine utilises the new SDKMESH2 format for PBR materials. All imported models have a bounding box automatically calculated, unless importing as a map, in which case mesh collision data is produced. Mesh collision data is stored in a proprietary file format which is a binary representation of each triangle in the model, which the engine's mesh collision system traverses to calculate collision responses. Another simple propriatary format is utilised for animated materials: these binary files work by storing a number of frames, and the timing intervals between them. The model renderer then applies this information at runtime when rendering each material.
To read a bit more about the engine, check out the repo below, or download the final game and give it a try!
Download View Source on GitHub
Planned Obsolescence
2019 Uni Project Windows Tools & Systems Programmer
A game where you play as an AI in control of a lab that's working to replace you.
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Planned Obsolescence was a game created in a group of three with a tangential link to the film Ex Machina. You play as an AI named TIM - the Totally Intelligent Machine - who is in control of a research lab currently working on a project to develop a new AI that supersedes TIM. The aim of the game is to delay the project to replace you so that it is eventually cancelled and you can remain in control.
The game features a full AI system and dynamic gameplay through a randomly selected map from the available map pool, there are also mappable keybinds and varying resolutions, as well as support for three languages.
As well as developing the game itself, I created a toolkit alongside the project which allowed us to produce maps and customise game elements through a friendly UI. The toolkit handled compiling game maps to improve performance of the game at runtime, as well as a few other handy features. As a result of the toolkit's map builder we saw a massive boost in performance, rendering just one map sprite instead of hundreds of individually placed tiles.
I also produced the logo for the game and created the UI, which I'm quite pleased with - it's a nice simple style which reflects the tone of the game well.
While the tool worked with XML, all data required by the game was compiled to JSON files at the map compile time, allowing for the nlohmann JSON library to be used within the game for parsing config files.
We completed the project in a couple of months and the final result came together quite nicely. It was shown to other students and staff in our class through an "expo" day, where it received positive feedback. I took some of the critiques that players had (such as highlighting tiles when clicked, and the need of a better tutorial) and implemented them into the game after the "expo" day.
The game can be downloaded below, with the editing tools available in the GitHub repo. Make some maps!
Download View Source on GitHub
The Founders
2019 Uni Project Windows/WebGL Systems Programmer
A local multiplayer game designed for touchscreen.
Read more...The Founders is a game designed for touchscreen, with local multiplayer in mind. Each player takes a role aboard a ship floating through space, with abilities ranging from movement to firing.
The aim of the game is to fly through space and collect contracts, after "consulting" with them to make them small enough to collect. The game is supposed to be a metaphor for a small organisation taking on projects and managing workloads.
Download View Source on GitHub
Atari 2600 Superhot
2019 Uni Project Windows Systems Programmer
A demake of Superhot in the style of an Atari 2600 game.
Read more...Created in a team of six over a few days, this game is a "demake" of Superhot, styled for the Atari 2600. We attempted to recreate the feel of an old console by utilising the correct resolution, colour scheme, sounds, and art.
Our aim with the game was not only to produce it quickly through fast iteration, but to have something that was fun to play and easy to pick up.
The game was intended to use some USB NES controllers we had, however all inputs remap to keyboard - with spacebar and W/A/S/D.
Download View Source on GitHub
Race to Mars
2018/19 Uni Project Windows Programmer
A four player networked co-op game with the aim of reaching Mars.
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As a lesson in designing and balancing game mechanics I developed a board game with a group. We worked as a team of five to decide on a theme for the game based on current news events, landing on the current SpaceX/Nasa Mars projects. From there we brainstormed a number of game ideas, eventually landing on the idea of a co-op game that had a win condition of getting to Mars successfully.
After creating the board game, two of our team moved on to create a four player networked version of the game for PC using the framework 'ASGE' for OpenGL. The game featured the core feature set from the board game as well as the networking mechanics you would expect, such as disconnect/reconnect, chat, and lobbies.
To see more about the networked game, check out the links at the bottom of this page, or read on to learn about the process of creating the board game which later became the PC game.
Initially we planned on having a system where players were assigned a number of movement points each turn and they would use those to move around a ship on the board. When moving to a space, they could fix any issues that were outstanding out of a number of issues that were pulled each turn. We quickly realised this complex movement was over complicated and didn't work for the game, so we decided to keep movement, but simplified. Less spaces were on the board to move between and movement points were taken from your dice roll which also add up to give you points to spend to fix issues.
Each turn, a counter representing the spaceship you're moving within is moved on the board and when it reaches Mars, you've won. To do that, you must keep your issues on-board below 5, completing all of them before being able to land on Mars itself. Added throughout the spaces are icons that prompt to you draw an objective card. Objective cards are a mechanic I introduced during our early play tests as there simply wasn't enough to do each turn. The objectives added a mechanic to work against your team in order to recieve personal points that would put you as the overall winner at the end of the game if you had the most.
The objective cards worked well to add another depth to the game outside of its core loop, however during testing we removed the personal points you gained and introduced team rewards that benefit everyone. Keeping track of personal points gained by working against your team didn't suit our USP of a co-op board game designed with team building in mind. Although you still sometimes work against eachother to complete objectives, it is always for the team's benefit.
As part of the project I developed an online card creator for the team to use that allowed anyone to produce effectively "production-ready" cards for the game. This was very valuable as it sped up our workflow massively and allowed us to playtest with final card designs and iterate on the card's contents without re-editing Photoshop documents!
Linked below is the presentation used to show our playtesting changes and final game concept, as well as a link to the card generator. Also below is our group's rule demonstration video.
Download View Source on GitHub View Presentation Visit Card Generator
