Focal Length

Focal Length was created as a Capstone project during FIEA Cohort 10. This game was made by a team of 20+ students over 8 months.

In Focal Length you play the role of a news camera operator struggling to get footage of an alien invasion happening all around you. The main gameplay mechanics all revolved around filming different subjects, different combinations of subjects, and getting certain shots in a limited amount of time.

For Focal Length I helped develop a complex UI system that was able to track what objects were currently on screen and how many points to award. As a team we designed a system where filming the same sorts of targets was worth less points to encourage diversity. We could track different combinations of targets (IE: Film a military soldier, a tank, and an alien in the same shot) to provide bonus points and complete objectives as  part of a fun quest system.
 
I personally developed a Node-based AI movement system that allowed designers to create the flow of pedestrians through the city.

Welcome

The best way to describe the core experience of Welcome is that one player is going through a haunted house and the other player is trying to scare their pants off. The "Fear Master" makes use of assorted abilities to try and confuse, corner, trap, and frighten the other player. The Fear Master could either control the experience through a PC or with a stand-alone app developed on the Sony Vita handheld. This game prototype was made by a team of 10 students over 2 months.

As the Programming Lead on Welcome, I developed a UI that allowed for our design team to quickly prototype new ability ideas and working cross platform PC and Vita networking code.

Monster Colony

Monster Colony was the first game I made at FIEA, and thus has a very special place in my heart. In Monster Colony you have the unique experience of controlling the rotation of a planetary body. Colonists and aliens move across this planet in an attempt to kill each other. While the aliens are on the sun side of the planet, they turn into stone and can be mined by the colonists for points, but while they are on the shady side of the planet they instantly kill anyone they touch. As you are trying to monitor 4 different colonists at the same time this already makes for a hectic gaming experience. We then really pile on the crazy by adding onto that meteors that fall to the planet and kill anything they touch, lunar eclipses that block the sun for brief periods of time, and alien space ships that shoot down a death beam that kills anything that rotates into it.

I worked on the core rotation mechanic, the timing system for eclipses and meteor showers, alien and colonist AI, and parts of the UI.
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This game was voted Most Fun out of all 55 of the games made during our first semester at FIEA.