Most recent project I have been involved in was a Mobile Game called Kingdom Jump. Here I was assigned the role of Enemy A.I. in which I developed movement, tracking and several other states which were all linked to different sets of animations.

We achieved our desired result via the use of a State Machine which had the correct animations linked to fire when needed. This was my first job coming out of University and it gave me a look into what the industry was like, the experience was invaluable. In this project, I mostly worked in Unity and C# which I had done before on some University projects. Unfortunately, the release date kept getting pushed back and it never got released.

University contributions:

Zephyr: The Cloud Odyssey

Third programmer responsible for the in-game physics-based traps seen in Zephyr: The Cloud Odyssey as well as working on the functionality of the Settings screen which gives the user options such as tweaking Music/Sound FX levels, changing the resolution to fit the preferences of the player. This project was made in Unity and was the first time I had used the engine with C# previously working in Unreal.

Thanks to this project, I learned a lot about how the physics system works within Unity by testing various Rigidbody configurations and how they affected the player via. the traps whilst tweaking the result to better fit the game.

With the help of the group, we have made a game that was fun to play yet challenging to master as it required tight movement and awareness of the environment at every stage to complete each level. We used the Agile working philosophy with regular stand-up meetings to make sure the game was taken in the right direction and each decision had the entire team behind it. Regular play testing also helped us to grasp the changes we needed to make to the mechanics to achive fluid gameplay. Our main way of collaboration was through Git and Source Control. Overall, I really enjoyed working on this project because of how challenging it was and I thought everyone else on the team did fantastic too.

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This was our final year project and my first experience working on a Horror-type game, and as a sole programmer it was rough to manage personally, as I did not realize how big the workload was going to be. In hindsight, I think I could have done a lot better to make the game more than what it is. Going back to Unreal and Blueprints after using Unity for a full year was a rough transition but nonetheless, we have managed to produce something interesting idea-wise but the execution could have been better.
Some of my contributions include:

- Making U.I elements appear when a certain object was clicked, this was done through a ray trace with a tag check in which, I check if the correct tag is present on the object and if so, show the appropriate U.I element out of the array.
- Having the ability to inspect certain objects and be able to rotate them around in a 3D space by using the mouse whilst applying a blur to make the item be the main focus.
- Various UX/U.I work as all of the Main Menu/Pause Menu components were created from scratch with the help of the artists to help with the visuals. In addition, the lock safe functionality as each button had to append onto the main text screen and a check of whether or not the user has the right answer.
- The two events that are currently in the game, these include making the Fae appear in front of the player upon exiting the room via a simple trigger. Finally, making the scratches appear/disappear on the window when close to the desk.
- The highlighting system which made certain objects blink a certain color to indicate importance. This was done via. the creation of a material that is applied over the top of the object itself. Personally, I haven't had much experience working with materials and as such, I am proud of what I was able to accomplish.
- The browser functionality, which was fairly simple to set-up as it used the built-in Unreal extension but as time went on, it proved to be very limiting as I wasn't able to successfully implement the usual browser features such as the back/forward buttons to make the experience more authentic.
- Setting up the beginning and end cutscenes.

Now and the future!

As of recent, I have been going from job-to-job to find out what it is that I truly want to spend my time doing. And I realized that programming was what I was missing, as it is still super-interesting for me to learn new languages and new challenges to face.

With the Games Development experience behind me, I hope to leverage that to learn more HTML/Java side with Front and Back End development.

My goal is to keep working, keep developing and keep getting better continously.

Thank you for your time reading this, hopefully it wasn't too long and do check-back to see how everything is going!

All the best!