Click Here to download exe

Angle Shooter was a very special game for me. It was the largest solo project that I’ve worked on up till this point. Not only did I greatly develop my programming skills with this project, but it also shows the peak of my level design and artistic abilities. All the the levels were hand drawn. I used graph paper and some marker to make the levels and then I scanned them in and set them to be the backdrop of my levels. Each level was carefully crafted to be unique while at the same time maintaining a proper difficulty curve. New mechanics were also consistently introduced as the levels progressed.

When making the game the basic idea I wanted to elaborate upon was the rectangular shape of the player and the different trade offs that were involved when navigating terrain and fighting enemies. You move the rectangle with the arrow keys and you’re able to roatate it by using the mouse. When fitting through tight spaces you often have to rotate the player to the correct angle to ensure that it can fit through the space. In combat you can choose for the player to face the enemy or be perpendicular to the enemy. In order to shoot at the enemy you have to be facing it, however this also leaves you the most exposed and it makes it harder to dodge the enemies shots. In order to expose the least amount of surface area the character must be facing perpendicular to the enemy. The enemy shoots in bursts of 5 or 6 shots so you want to position the character accordingly to maximize damage and minimize exposure. I’m not sure how well the level design enforced this mechanic but that was the idea anyway.

From a programming perspective this was tricky due to the shear amount of feature that the player needed to be able to incorporate. The rotation was a tricky problem for a long time since I couldn’t use a simple box for collision checking and you could rotate the player to make it collide with walls which was not something I was used to incorporating. Additionally the player could have speed upgrades, shooting upgrades, various keys and the ability to change color. The health bar and the key inventory were incorporated in the character image. I’m happy with the result. The character was able to convey a lot of information without looking cluttered. All of the features I have mentioned needed to be applied to the player and whenever you have a lot of things working in parallel you pretty much always run into issues with odd cases where the feature conflict each other.

At the point of making this game I had a pretty sizeable toolkit of game maker tricks that I had learned. On this project I feel like I did a good job of using the different tricks in variation and using little bits only as needed without making any particular feature or mechanic too blatent.

Unheralded

On July 24, 2015 by apc With 0 Comments - Featured Portfolio Projects

This was my 3rd attempt at starting a development team. Odinn was in charge of art and was based out of the Netherlands. I was in charge of programming and I was based here in the US. This got farther along than previous attempts, largely because there were only 2 of us and we were communicating a lot more. We even made a few devlog episodes. Unfotunately we eventually decided to stop because it was difficult to stay in sync, we had busy schedules, we had made the scope too large and we both sort of lost interest in the project.

We had a complex story in mind. The main character was a boy who randomly gets powers for some unknown reason and he spends the game running from the government in addition to trying to better understand his powers. There were several powers we had in mind. The ones that eventually got implemented were telekenesis, where the player can lift objects with his mind, and a couple variations of force push.

Other than gaining more experience working in teams I also gained a lot from a technical perspective. I wanted to try and make the force push realistic looking so I was very ambitious with the physics system. I ended up getting it working pretty well but rotation was what stumped me. Luckly yoyogames had recently implemented a physics system into Game Maker Studio. It was difficult to learn because using physics meant that I had to do a lot of the basic operations in Game Maker using the physics system rather than the version I was experienced with. I eventually got used to it and was able to make some pretty neat effects. Using this knowledge I was later made a youtube series about the intricacies of using physics in game maker.

Click Here to see the source

This was my term project for my Graphical User Interfaces course. The assignment was to use swing to create a rubiks cube simulator. The minimum requirement was to just show 1 face at a time, and this could be done by only having 9 blocks on the screen and those blocks could be buttons so in that case no graphics programming would be necessary. Since I have a mild obsession with Rubiks Cubes (my record solve time at the time of posting is 39 seconds 🙂 ) and I was very comfortable with Swing, even before the class, I decided to go all out with this project.

The main area is just a JPanel, however did alot of custom drawing in the JPanel. It also included some math to determine which button was being hovered based on the mouse position. The backend was pretty fun to write. Even though the cube is build up of 26 blocks it was easier to think of it as 54 subfaces. I just had to make sure all those faces were manipulated correctly for each operation. Then for drawing the 27 faces which happened to be on those sides were drawn.

I additionally had several extra mechanics in the sidebar such as as undo button and a move counter. In tournaments a single move is one turning of a face, regardless if it’s a quarter or semi turn. So I accounted for this in my move counter. It even resets the move if you do an eniter turn. It aspect of the sidebar which I’m most happy with is the fact that’s it’s configurable. There are several extra features but you can choose which ones go in the sidebar.

The last thing I’d like to talk about is that you don’t need to use the mouse. Everything is also mapped to keyboard shortcuts. So I guess in theory if one was trying to solve the cube as fast as possible they could do so by just typing a series of commands on the keyboard,

Shadeux

On July 17, 2015 by apc With 0 Comments - Featured Portfolio Projects

Link coming soon, if it takes too long remind me.

This was a project I worked on with Austin for our mobile development class. It was the first game I’ve worked on which was made (almost) completely from scratch in a programming language. It took us several hours to just get rectangles to be drawn on the screen in the way that we wanted to and we built it up to be a solid platformer with score and level detection.

The platform is a cross between standard runner games such as Bit Trip Runner or The Impossible Game or Geometry Dash and a concept from an old flash game called Shift. So like runner games you’re being pushed through a level and pretty much the only thing you can do is avoid jump, however our game implements an extra mechanic which was taken from Shift. You can flip the terrain so that hills become trenches, gravity flips and the player moves to the opposite side of the screen.

The name is pretty perfect. The “Shadow” sounding aspect relates to the black/white art style. The embeded “deux” is the french work for 2 which reflects the duality of the terrain. The term “Shadeux” is a french word on its own and it’s sometimes called Darcour, or Parcour used for illegal purposes. This nicely reflects the platforming and also reforce the black and white art style.

We designed the levels using a level editor I made for one of the ealier verions of Preying Mantis (this was before the development of that game shifted to Game Maker Studio) I’ll probalby release it at some point. It works well for games with simple level design.

Click Here for download links

This is a project I worked on at school with a club called VGDev. VGDev joins up in the beginning of the semester and splits up into about 5 teams. The goal is for each team to have a game completed by end of the semester. VGDev is a really cool club. You can not only learn a lot about game development but the philosophy of “getting the game done” is great since it forces you to work through the hardest part of the project and stick with it which is a valuable skill no matter what the project is that you’re working on.

This was my first experience with Unity and also my first experience with C#. C# is very similar to Java so I didn’t learn too much there but I did learn a lot just working with Unity. All my previous experience was with Game Maker, Unity is different in that it’s primarily a 3D engine and it uses an official programming language rather than a simplified language made for the engine. It felt nice being able to use C# because it gave me more control and there was less ambiguity in my code.