MAK OS Game Project

The second game jam that I did in my third year was on a game we later dubbed 'MAK OS'. The concept of which was randomly generated to be, "A game with no interactivity at all where you taunt fish."

Suffice to say, this was hardly the best brief we could have hoped for. However, we pressed on and eventually we made a game out of it, even if we had to scrap the 'no interactivity' part of the game. After all, we decided that was just a walking simulator or a screensaver.

We settled with the player controlling an AI which was trapped in a company building owned by 'Fish Co'. They were fed up of the annoying humans and decided to annoy them back.

I created the Ai system which controlled the human workers that the player was trying to annoy. This utilised the navmesh system that Unity provides, and uses a decision algorithm of my own design to select places for the worker to go.

In my opinion the gameplay is somewhat limited by the fact you are indirectly effecting the annoyance of the humans. You tweak items of office equipment in order to annoy them which doesn't really give much sense of immediacy or satisfaction. There are a lot of issues with the gameplay, and we decided later that MAK OS was more of a piece of tech than a fully fledged game.

Nonetheless, if you wish to take a look, feel free to download the project on the link below.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B2-4-3Aj27LXSktENHlRSjlFWGc?usp=sharing

Ascension Game Project

During my third year of university, I really found my footing with programming and games design. This can perhaps, most clearly be seen in the several game jams which I did as part of my course.

The first game jam that we did was for a game that we called 'Ascension'. The theme of the jam was to make a 'sticky' game, the idea was that there was one main core mechanic that could be easily repeated and would always be fun. In that respect, we decided that a competitive element was the be the key to our stickiness, thus, we made a 2 player competitive game.

I was in charge of the AI for the game which was designed to shoot down projectiles at the players in order to hinder their progress. The player's aim was to get to the top of the screen before the other, and they would be hindered in this by obstacles and AI opponents which would shoot down at them.

The first Ai I designed merely strafed from left to right and back again, shooting as it did. While the other tracked the player in first place and tried to shoot it down.

Ascension was a success, however there were some technical issues with it's implementation. Systems conflicted, and this showed. It really needed another pass to polish and fix the bugs which were inherent in it's systems. My strafing shooter can actually be broken by the screenshake effect if it is close to a wall, as it relies on the walls to change direction.

The project can be downloaded via a link should you wish to check it out.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B2-4-3Aj27LXbWc2WDFGWEVxcFU?usp=sharing