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View My College Work Below
Below you'll find some of the major projects I completed during my Bachelor's degree program at Full Sail University, in reverse-chronological order.
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Going back, I'd like to have learned more about the programming/development side of game design. However, I'm very happy to have learned all of the fundamentals of game design throughout my time at Full Sail.
Full Sail Projects: Welcome
Balloonatics by Team Data Detectives
Data Detectives' Capstone Project
This was the culmination of two and a half years of attending Full Sail! With a team of four other design students, and two talented artists that helped shape the game to look the way it does, Data Detectives built their first game as a team from complete scratch.
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Our game, Balloonatics, was based off of the popular tower defense game Bloons Tower Defense. From that initial inspiration, we took to prototyping what the original source game played like. After a well-functioning replica of the game, we took to adding in more elements that pertain to the genre, additional bells and whistles, etc. Everyone in the team designed and created their own subset of levels, myself being no exception.
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Of course, things went awry every now and then. Team members wanting certain features to go different directions, the daunting process of bug-fixing, as well as the process of hooking everything up in a mechanic or feature once you've created all the main functionality! Overall, the team's biggest shortcoming was that we were all still students of the industry, so getting our feet wet became the main objective (in my opinion).
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In short, I found that the time spent developing Balloonatics as it is current was well worth it. We were all passionate about making the game as high-quality as we could help getting it to, and with the help of the artists it became a lot less of a burden on us to make it look the part! In the end, we were a group of students and artists who wanted to try our hand at making a great game, and for our level of experience we succeeded.
If you have the time, try out our game. It's free! If you want to try out the levels I made, start the game and use the developer's win key (W) to skip ahead to the "Theater" levels.
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Thanks for reading, and I hope to hear your thoughts on my work.
Full Sail Projects: Projects
Elevator Pitch
One of the great things about Full Sail University was that we didn't focus on any particular part of the development process. Of course, making a game was the real meat of it, but for projects like this one, we had to practice and iterate on our ability to conceptualize and develop our own ideas into a pitch that could fit into a four-minute time slot. I took a mini-pitch I created from a previous brainstorming lab and converted it into a full idea that I could present to an audience.
My idea ended up being a pitch for a stealth-based game that uses a card system that differs from the conventional ability system. The player uses a card to affect the environment and to certain tasks without raising too much suspicion. As the player uses cards, the cards get used and replaced by randomly selected cards. as well as increasing suspicion. It was really tough trying to take a half-baked idea and add some genuine merit to it, but I'm proud at fleshing out the idea into the pitch presentation you see here!
Full Sail Projects: Projects
The Floor is Lava
This was the first video game that I created from complete scratch. I received no outside help aside from some basic Unity tutorials. I found this project to be the most fun out of all of my projects so far in Full Sail, mostly because of the fact that I had completely free will (aside from the predetermined theme the instructor gave us) to choose what game to make and how I wanted it done.
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The biggest challenge that I faced on this project were the scripts. I got stuck on many different parts of making the game because I couldn't figure out how to put in a feature through code! This made me push through and re-think many different ways to go about implementing everything you see in game. I even had to create an artificial gravity system independent of the one Unity already made because my character wasn't colliding with the floor correctly!
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To sum things up, I loved the process of putting together The Floor is Lava. This project made me realize the difficulty of each different branch of making a video game. Whether you're doing the scripts or creating the animations, you've got your work cut out for you and no one else is going to do it. However, the joy I found in making the project was the fact that I had to do everything. I learned the most about making a game in this class than any of the other classes beforehand!
Full Sail Projects: Projects
Double Dash
This was another board game I created in my world building class. This class emphasized the importance of trial and error, and how the first finished product is almost never the last. There are going to be countless iterations on the design of a product, and I as a game designer have become a little more prepared to handle this process after creating my simplistic board game Double Dash.
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In Double Dash, players simply need to capture all of their opponents pieces, similar to checkers. However, movement is determined through the roll of a dice. Sometimes, play testers would get lucky enough and completely outmatch their opponent, and sometimes the opposite would happen. It was through the observation of these play tests that I got to re-design the game board, add and modify certain rules, and make the players really think about their move by putting various limits on what they can do.
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I had a lot of fun making this project. The best part was watching the play testers enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed making it!
Full Sail Projects: Projects
Toxic Shipyard - Making the Level a Reality
Turning the Shipyard into a Unity Level
After creating the level map, the next step was to turn the drawing into a playable level using the Unity Engine.
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We started by inserting our level maps onto a blank surface so that we could see how the level would look from a top-down perspective. After that, we started making prefabs that resembled the shape of the structures in the level. My level being mostly shipping containers, you can imagine how many of those I made. Going forward, we worked on inserting our game mechanics into the level by creating prefabs and installing a pre-made manager script onto those prefabs. From there, we told the objects to either play an animation or behave in some other way that the player could perceive the object as a mechanic.
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My two mechanics were the toxic barrel, which was moved out of the way when interacted with, and the smaller cranes that are scattered throughout the level, which rotates when the lever is pulled. These mechanics worked off of simply using animations for each object to open up a new path for the player to progress through. There is also the toxic water scattered all around the place, continually applying damage to the player until the player's health reaches zero.
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Finally, we took our levels, joined into groups of students, and put all 5 of our levels together to create an elongated SCRAPS experience. This wasn't easy, though. We ran into the trouble of aligning our levels so that the entrance and exits to each level were lined up appropriately. Then we sculpted terrains around our levels to hide the lower part of the skybox from the player, creating a natural game world to navigate through. Finally, we put on beta-level textures to our game objects to finish out the aesthetics and complete the SCRAPS experience.
Full Sail Projects: Projects
Toxic Shipyard - Level Map
The First Step in a Major Project
This was the first major step in making a game with many different students putting time and effort into the same thing. This was the result of my work in creating a level map for Full Sail's game SCRAPS. For my design, I chose to go with a shipyard with various scattered drums of toxic sewage. The player's main goal would be to get to the large crane's controls to lift a certain shipping container away from the rest to access a care package that had fallen into a crevice.
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This map was the starting point to actually creating the game level. I started with the idea of using the containers in a shipyard to create more verticality than a traditional platforming level would allow. The level's requirements had us implement items, mechanics using the environment, and putting in our own custom animations for the mechanics we set in place. Later on, we were also responsible for creating the entire level from scratch!
Full Sail Projects: Projects
Vector Game
My First 3D Video Game
This was the first 3d game that I created in the Unity Engine. This game was a result of hours of trying to figure out how to properly code! While the player's movement, gravity system and scene transitions were provided, everything else you see is of my own work. I created the scripts for the disappearing blocks, the jumping/trampoline physics, the distance-based statistics you see on-screen, and of course the ability to win or lose.
Although I finally finished a fully functioning game, this game is mostly here as a milestone in my game development career. Feel free to play it if you like! (Be sure to press Alt + F4 to exit the game)
Full Sail Projects: Projects
The Great Escape!
My First Game Created in Full Sail
This was the first game I created in Full Sail. The Great Escape! is a cooperative card game where up to 4 people have to work together to all get a certain amount of points. However, the game gets harder as it goes on and more losing conditions are presented on the way. Looking back, I would have done many things about the game differently, but I'm glad that this game is a reflection of where my game-making skills begin.
Full Sail Projects: Bio
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