The game Maze Craze 20 seconds to Mars The next jam I entered was the 20 second game jam. Now this is my kind of theme! It had a clear constraint and - although it was a month long - it was a lot of fun devising different ways to design gameplay lasting a maximum of 20 seconds. Some of the previous entries are, frankly, incredible with my absolute favourite being Rubblar - a game about a wibbly wobbly rubber arm robbing a bank....
The game Agent Hackman Stealth The theme of the Github Game Off was “secrets” which is just about as vague a theme as you can get without flipping to a random page in the dictionary and blindly poking at a word. We were also given a month to complete it. For me, this was paralysing. I couldn’t focus on this jam for ages, as it felt like an inordinate amount of time with such a vague concept....
The game Cafe Day in Autumn Autumn The first game jam I entered was the Cozy Fall Jam - a thematically strong and focused jam making a cozy game which was … well, autumnal. Though I grew up in a country that didn’t have a strong cultural attachment to the season like the US, I was familiar with the morning frost, warm drinks and the colours of falling leaves. Despite eucalyptus being evergreen… (thank God for invasive deciduous species?...
I spent a month off from my day job to focus on working on my game development skills, and really dive deep into a hobby I’d had on the backburner for many years. What I did was sign up to five different Game Jams on itch.io and I want to spend the next few posts talking about each of them in detail. A what? So what’s a Game Jam? Well I had only really heard about them second-hand - some kind of 24-hour hackathon to create a game from scratch....
I have been trying my hand at creating pixel art from scratch (thanks to Libresprite) and it’s been oddly satisfying. I was able to whip up this familiar image fairly quickly using the original as a reference: Something super interesting is how much you have to do with so little, so every pixel is really important and counts towards the final product. Also dithering can make such a difference for shading and gradients....
About five years ago I started noting down each time I finished a book with a simple “rating” (ranging from Bad -> Excellent) and some quick words about how I felt about it. I can’t remember where I read about this concept, but it was called maintaining a “book of books”. It’s been an interesting experience thus far, and from observing and summarising the data I have the following conclusions:...
One of the things that makes game design incredibly difficult is that, unlike traditional linear media, you have little control over the experience of the person interacting with it. However, you can put all the pieces down, and guide them aesthetically and procedurally towards the intended experience. One classic example that comes to my mind is the board game Splendor. The TL;DR of this is game is that you are gathering “prestige” by buying, selling and trading precious stones....
Recently I’ve been on a retro gaming binge - things like SimCity 3000 and Titanic: Adventure out of time (the latter of which I learnt is now old enough that someone has managed to emulate it within the browser However I decided to also try something … new? If you could call it that - but Lies of P which, to say it’s inspired by FromSoft would be an understatement, is exactly the kind of game I enjoy....
This is my first post here - so if you’re seeing this, welcome! I’ve tried many blog post sites and portfolios over the years and I’m hoping this is the one that sticks. I’d like to be able to showcase things I’m working on, as well as share any thoughts I have in lieu of Twitter … well, we all know what happened to Twitter.
Hi! 👋 I started my foray into coding with my Bachelor of Computer Science, majoring in Games Development in 2014. Most of my time at university was spent delving into the details of C++ with OpenGL, being part of a team prototyping our own 2D sidescroller from scratch as well as the in’s and out’s of game design, prototyping and playtesting. Since then I’ve spent nearly a decade in the tech sector working in fullstack web development roles, utilising all sorts of languages on the backend from Groovy, Golang, Kotlin and Python, with the (now) classic combo of Typescript and React on the frontend....