Windbound was a much bigger project than anything I had worked on previously. The team at 5-Lives are all incredibly competent and very welcoming, and getting in amongst that, let alone being able to contribute myself was phenomenal.
I came in fairly late in production, in the grand scheme, so for the main game, I mostly had a hand in fixing bugs, setting up some systems for the photo mode, and setting up achievements. My personal point of pride for Windbound though is my work on the DLC, since I got to set up the systems for the puzzle towers. Working on systems like that is so very playful and joyful, and had we had more time I think we could have really made some interesting and compelling little puzzles. I’m proud of what we got done though!
If you’re interested, you can find Windbound pretty much anywhere (PS4, Switch, Xbox, Epic, Steam), just search for Windbound!
Planet Watch is a gamified interface for students to observe how much power is being used at their school. I came onto this a little later in the project, so a lot of the major systems were already set in place. I overhauled a few things in terms of programming and set up the client side API for retrieving data. The map system was originally going to be much more complex, but what I ended up with served the requirements a bit better.
I ended up doing a fair bit in terms of UI and animations on this one, am particularly proud of the little hologram that floats around the offline planets.
Zombie Nom Nom was a game designed for the Gear VR. You play as a zombie, gallivanting around the world ‘making friends’… by zombifying the population.
I was mostly doing programming on this one, with the odd minor animation task. I’m very fond of the work I did on the bobble heads and traffic lights.
Lost Creature Finder was a project I worked on for the Queensland Museum. It’s functionally a collection of little Warioware style minigame gauntlets, where the prize at the end is a dinosaur fossil.
The majority of the moving parts here are mine, including the state navigation and the game play, although it is now being maintained by another team. I’m particularly fond of the little animated puppet on the map screen. The elastic movements were very fun to animate dynamically.
Sim Cell was the first project I worked on professionally. I was a junior programmer, doing odd jobs for the most part. I had a hand in the UI, collision detection and the state and save systems.
The team was really great to work with and it was a fantastic springboard into the world of game development.
Flights of Fancy was my final year project at Griffith, and the first game of its scale that I had ever made. It was made by a three person team, with myself on programming.
The game itself was a side on endless glider, with the player performing tricks to collect boost and keep themselves in the air.
The physics for how the player moves, swoops and dives is entirely custom, and took up a big chunk of my time, but it really gave the game that special edge. It felt incredible to play, like skateboarding upside down.
You can check it out over here.
