Bounty Broker is dystopian narrative game telling the story of the player working a boring desk job in a dystopian sci-fi universe. The gameplay occurs entirely on a computer screen style interface where the player does their job by interacting with various applications. The narrative of the game would be told entirely through a “Slack” like application where they can talk to their co workers and learn about the world through conversation.
Above is the prototype for this game idea, the first video shows the booting up of the computer like interface and sets the kind of cold cooperate tone the makes up a big part of the game. You then see a basic computer interface with a few applications installed.
The second Video shows how the slack style narrative interface would work with many of slacks features replicated with fictional characters where dialogue can easily be authored by the game developer to deliver the story.
Currently this just exists in prototype form but i think it would be a very nice narrative game that id love to make in the future if i ever had the time.
Personal project where I created a system for generating hex based strategy game maps. The main focus of this project was to learn more about hexagon grids and develop some nice tools I could either use in future personal projects or game jams.
I managed to get a pretty good understanding of how ex grids worked pretty quickly and it was a great exercise in thinking differently about movement on a grid as well as procedural generation with hexes.
The dungeon rooms are initially placed by randomly spawning them inside a radius. This results in a lot of overlapping squares, Separating Axis Theorem is then used to detect which squares are overlapping. The squares are then moved outward from the overlapped squares until they are no longer overlapping, similarity to how a lot of physics based collision systems work. So Separating Axis Theorem is in this case quite literally used to separate the dungeon rooms.
Delaunay Triangulation
Now that the rooms have been placed they need to be connected. A great to connect a large volume of points is triangulation. Delaunay triangulation is a form of triangulation that results in the points being triangulated in such a way that no point is inside a triangle. This is ideal for dungeons as that means we wont have any crazy overlapping or strange long connections.
Urquhart Graph
Once the rooms have all been connected we don’t need every single connection so you want to construct a planer graph for a more balanced amount of connections. There are lots of different planar graphs that can be used but i chose the Urquhart graph due its simplicity and elegance. How it works is you go through all the triangles and simply remove the longest side. This results in a very pleasing and effective set of coordinates.
About
In this project I created a procedural dungeon generator by combining several different algorithms. You start by randomly placing a set amount of rectangles in a defined radius. You then separate out the rectangles so none are overlapping using Separating Axis Theorem. Once you have all the rooms placed you connect them up using Delaunnay Triangulation. This results in a nice set of triangles but we don’t need that many connections, we need to make a more dungeon like layout which i do here by using a Urquhart graph to get a very dungeon-y lay out of paths. We now have all the data we need, we just have to construct it. So we take the rooms and replace the inner areaswith floor tiles and the outer areas with wall tiles, we then can replace connection lines with corridor tiles and then finally we have a dungeon.
This system will hopefully be fleshed out further in the future with the addition of a random interior to the dungeon rooms with multiple kinds of tiles.
Unity’s Entity Component System was used to create dynamic and interesting voxel water allowing us to have tens of thousands of individual voxels acting as water at any one time.
Arcade Style Racing Game
The game was created to have similar game play feel to games like Crash Team Racing and Mario Cart. This meant making the driving more focused on fun than realism and having mechanics like power ups.
Non-Standard Controllers
The Game, while supporting other control schemes like mouse and keyboard or game pad, was built to be used with Hands On Throttle-And-Stick controllers (HOTAS). This was an interesting technical challenge as the game needed to be designed and developed to get the most out of these controllers and make sure the game worked well and was fun to play with them.
About
Vox Racers is an Arcade style racing game with a voxel style. In order to focus on maximizing the fun of faced paced racing games the game was built to be played with HOTAS ( Hands On Throttle-And-Stick) controllers which allows the player to have much more control over tight turns and allowed for precise acceleration and deceleration as well as generally making the hover vehicles more fun to control. The team that worked on the game consisted of one artist, one sound engineer and 3 programmers. I worked on much of the environment effects like the water system as well as procedural elements of the game, asset implementation, tools programming and a lot of general bug fixing.
Vox Racers started off as a game jam game though grew to being much more. The team that made it thought that it had a lot of potential so they decided to expand the team and keep working on it. That’s when i was brought on, together we decide to enter the game in Abertay University’s Dare Academy Competition. This consisted of a video pitch, an in person pitch to industry veterans, a week of hot housing where we could work on the game and get guidance and finally a trip to EGX where we could expo the game to the public and the winner would be decided. we managed to get into the competition and got through each of those stages and got to show the game of at EGX. though we didn’t win being in the final six teams was a great honour and Vox Racers was very popular with the general public which was very rewarding to see. since then the game has been work on more and hopefully in the future will be able to be released.
