Mello Madness
Team Jelly Battlers
Project Description
Mello Madness is a co-op puzzle platformer where 2 Players use the unique abilities of their characters to traverse a series of levels designed to test the Players’ creativity and teamwork. Our team of 4 students built this game as a senior capstone project in the Fall of 2017. We entered into a competition against other senior capstone projects, earning fourth place as well as a perfect score.
Key Mechanic – Stretching
One Player can stretch their character vertically, forming a wall. The other Player can become a platform by stretching their character horizontally.
What I Contributed
- Designed and implemented main character mechanics including basic movement and stretching features.
- Refined main character details like color and behavior of facial features to better reflect in-game mechanics.
- Guided brainstorming sessions to decide on overall design philosophy for each level.
- Built critical early levels to teach the Players basic mechanics and devised guidance features based on feedback gathered from regular playtesting.
AR Craft Academy
IMAG 2018 Summer Games Team
Project Description
Key Mechanic – AR Model
(Dramatization) The Player initially places a to-scale 3D model of the cockpit of the T6 in the world.
What I Contributed
- Led our team’s design process, established a safe and inclusive design space, and built alignment around a shared vision.
- Directed iterative design process based on playtesting by identifying representative user groups and regularly gathering and responding to player feedback.
- Designed the Guided Learning Mode and Test Mode along with appropriate guidance and feedback systems.
- Set sprint goals and deadlines and helped the team establish an effective workflow using JIRA.
- Implemented key features including major UI elements and interactions, backend for the learning and test segments of the game, and diegetic guidance systems.
AAA Multiplayer FPS #1
Certain Affinity
Project Description
Game mode for a well-loved AAA IP featuring tight FPS gameplay on a large map with high player counts built using UE5, C++, and blueprint scripting. Further details covered by NDA. References available upon request.
What I Contributed
- Created network performant solutions for bouncing, spinning, and rolling projectile motion.
- Implemented a generalized hit response system connecting gameplay behaviors and visual/audio cues to material-based physics hit events.
- Leveraged above systems to implement throwable weapons that could bounce, stick to enemies, detonate based on timers, deal AOE damage, and impart forces using the Gameplay Ability System.
- Worked with designers to tune the behavior of throwables based on playtest feedback.
AAA Multiplayer FPS #2
Certain Affinity
Project Description
AAA multiplayer FPS built using UE5, C++, and blueprint scripting. Further details covered by NDA. References available upon request.
What I Contributed
- Drove efforts to determine desired networking model for firing projectiles and player hit detection and refined existing solutions to match model.
- Created network performant solution for burst and fully-automatic weapons, and used system to implement a fully-automatic weapon in BPs.
- Implemented animation-driven reloading supporting configurable delays and variable reload amounts.
- Extended system for spawning networked actors and to support rotation and lerping to correct client-side visual movement/trajectories to match server-calculated trajectories.
Lamb Chop
Personal Project
Project Description
Key Mechanic – Movement
The Player is able to move accurately in relation to the direction of the camera with additional animations for stopping and quickly turning.
What I Contributed
- Created a believable locomotion system with handling for animating key edge cases like quickly turning and stopping. Also added basic actions like sprinting and jumping.
- Designed and implemented a combat system for performing a light attack combo with accurate hit detection, knockback, damage, and input lockout features.
- Added a “smart” targeting system that interprets player input to determine target and adjusts player attack direction to ensure valid attacks reach their intended targets.
- Created a basic enemy AI using behavior trees allowing for a notion of player detection and pathfinding pursuit.
- Implemented a blink/warp attack to enable the Player to quickly close distance with a selected target.
YouTube Content
As McFrostyBoy
Project Description
I’ve made over 50 instructional YouTube videos for Apex Legends, intended to help Players transition from casual to intermediate levels of play. Over the course of several months from late 2020 to early 2021, I handled all aspects of creating, uploading, and marketing my content, peaking at 12K views on my most popular video. I had a lot of fun making the content and gained a lot of experience in terms of tailoring an experience for a specific group of Players.
Featured Video – Ranked Rotations
One of my more popular videos that uses a few simple graphical effect to teach players effective rotations for the ranked game mode in Apex Legends.
What I Contributed
- Content Creation – I handled all aspects of creating the content that went into my videos. This involved determining the original concept of a given video, storyboarding the various cuts that would make up the video, tracking down and cutting gameplay footage, capturing greenscreen video footage, editing and syncing audio, adding in custom visuals and special effects, and ultimately assembly of all of the aforementioned content into a final video.
- Self-Promotion – I also handled the aspects of branding both within my videos and in general to provide continuity to the Players who would be consuming my content. This included identifying common visual elements to specifically re-use between videos, determining a visual standard for thumbnails, creating unique and distinctive thumbnails based on that standard. I also identified the discovery pathways that Players would follow to actually find my content and devised strategies for which sub-communities to target.
- Managing Social Community – Finally, I fostered a fun and inclusive social community of Players that gathered around my content. Specifically, I laid out a clear set of community guidelines on all platforms where Players would be able to interact with one another and proactively reached out to Players in order to maintain the values of inclusivity set forth by those guidelines.