Jack M.
An aspiring game developer with a love for game worlds
After finishing my first year of school my eyes are wide open to the fantastic world of game development. Yet a novice to the whole industry, I've found my passion to be world creation. What makes the game world engaging and immersive to the player? From gorgeous game audio to eye-popping visual affects, I want to draw the player into the worlds I've created for them.
Past Projects
Splendiforous was a game jam made with a small team of artists, designers, and programmer. The jam's theme was colorful, and we decided on a 2D platformer where we have to bring color back into the world.
My job was that; bringing color back. I had a blast working with renderers and Bezier curves, both of which I had hardly touched before, in order to make the player see and feel the color coming back. You can see an example below, as well as a link to the game's itch page.
Earthwrecked is a currently-in-progress production with a team of students from my school. Even though it is still a WIP, I am so excited about this project and having so much fun I just wanted to share it.
Earthwrecked is a horror, first person exploration game with roguelike procedural generation. My task on the project is world generation and exploration. I'd never worked with procedural generation before, and delving into the vast community of roguelike development was awe inspiring. There is simply so many ways to go about world generation, it was almost overwhelming. Eventually I found a method that worked for our game. You can see a visual example of how the world is generated below; essentially, the world simulates itself on a 2d grid, creating a room at a time then fitting those rooms into the larger map. Then it populates the map with terrain, enemies, and interactables, then instantiates the world using the 2d array.
After creating the world, we wanted the player to be able to explore. First Person is a tricky thing when it comes to random generation; without the ability to look around and see a wider map, it is very easy to get lost. I incorporated a minimap to not only help the player keep track of where they are, but also encourage the player to explore. In addition, we wanted to give the player a sense of direction, so we added some glowing fruits, which I made change color the closer you got to your goal.
Overall, Earthwrecked has been a blast to put together, and I can't wait to see the end result.
Lastly, I'd like to share a personal project of mine. I've been working on a Unity tool that hopefully designers could use while working with game audio. It allows you to live-adjust audio mixer group levels while in the scene, without having to navigate to the audio mixer itself, to make sure things like sound effects aren't overwhelming music or dialogue.
Unofortunately, this project is on a small hiatus while I focus on Earthwrecked, but I hope to return to it soon to finish it up. Audio is especially something I have a passion for, and I hope to continue expanding my skills in that field.
