Out Of The Blue (Unreal Engine)
Out Of The Blue, is my first Unreal personal project and current work in progress as I continue to learn Unreal Engine. It is an island-based, open world exploration adventure game featuring lost treasure hunts, both on land and in the deep sea. This enticing but formidable tropical paradise, once a secretive port for treasure fleet shipping voyages, holds the clues to unearthing numerous valuable artifacts in the region which have been missing for centuries.
- Utilized landscape scuplting/alpha stamping tools to create a detailed island and its surrounding sea floor geography. Customized the Brushify auto-landscape materials with a selection of Quixel and Substance textures to paint a realistic island environment. Set up procedural grass and tree spawners with various purchased assets to work in conjunction with the landscape materials & their placements. Spent a lot of time with Blender learning how to fix poorly created 3d models found online; altering broken UVs, smoothing errors, flipping normals, centering pivot origins, joining innumerable meshes/vertices when necessary, reducing excessive material counts, texturing blank models and creating simple assets when needed.
- Employed Quixel Bridge and Mixer to import assorted Megascans 3D assets, decals, and textures to match the atmosphere of the scene. Heavily tweaked an Unreal Marketplace ocean plugin to mimic the clear blue Caribbean setting while adding some shore wetness functionality and crashing wave particle effects. Scaled, tinted, & color matched the diverse grasses, foliage, decals, and rocks to populate the scene in an authentic manner.
- Fine-tuned post-processing ambience, reflection captures, hdri spheres & sky/cloud blueprints, dynamic lighting, Sky Atmosphere scattering and fog distribution to better match the scene, and adjustments to wind and character interaction through the animated foliage.
- Many (somewhat successful) attempts were made to optimize performance as this is a very important area of game dev that I'm striving to learn. Looked at various visualization modes and fixed some shader complexity highpoints/outliers, modified lightmap density, used Unreal's auto-LOD system to fix some bad LOD colorations with high-poly meshes, world ambient occlusion & anti-aliasing tweaks, and made sure textures can mipmap while also reusing similar normal and roughness maps across multiple assets.
Office / Base Of Operations (Unreal Engine)
Out Of The Blue needed a kind of base of operations office location where the player can research sites and plan the next excursion. The space needed to convey a sense of lived-in professionalism accompanied by archaic books, maps, and high-value relics strewn about, while also seeming cluttered and disorganized, hinting at the main character's unmotivated lifestyle and desperate need for an assignment. I applied what I've learned about setting up an interior environment and creating realistic lighting that flows through the locale, while keeping in mind the design of aesthetically pleasing model arrangements from multiple view angles.
- Carefully positioned objects in the small room that relate to treasure hunting and expedition preparations.
- Directional lighting, sky atmosphere, & postprocess adjustments to present a lifelike late afternoon or mid-morning setting.
- Dramatic shadows were cast at an angle that adds interest to the bare parts of floors & walls. Ambient occlusion levels in conjunction with skylight balancing and recaptures give a more natural look to the dusty corners & crevices.
- The many large windows meant a lot of attention was paid to reflections settings, roughness materials, and overly distracting lens flares.
Office / Base Of Operations Night Scene (Unreal Engine)
I altered the office scene to experiment with a nighttime lighting transformation. I ventured into volumetric lighting and fog systems for this example, which really helps the assorted spot lights and moon glow emerge to create a smoky theatrical effect over the area.
Mage Horde (Unreal Engine)
Mage Horde, is a top-down melee/magic survival game based on an Unreal Engine course taken at: Udemy
This comprehensive course provided my introduction to Unreal Engine 4 where I learned how to create landscapes, blueprints/game logic, materials, animations, lighting/post-processing, and enemy AI spawning & attacking among a slew of other useful techniques.
Obie (C# Unity)
Obie, a once promising young golf ball, had been inexplicably shanked off the tee in a long ago golf match where by some cosmic mystical occurrence, awakens confused and scared. Able to shake free from the mud and debris, Obie finds that it is capable of controlling its own momentum and flight, if by a limited amount. This game follows the perilous journey through the most uninhabitable of places designed to showcase AI state machine algorithms for pathfinding, chasing and evading, and changing positions on cartesian coordinate systems.
- Gameplay programmer for projectile shooter, pickup/inventory system, mouse-camera-aim, health monitoring, and player controller.
- AI programmer for enemy encounters including proximity based, navmesh chase and patrol patterns, and enemy combat.
- Designer for environment terrain mesh, texturing, lighting, volumetric fog, water effects, 3D modeling, and everything else.
Die Nasty (C# Unity)
Die Nasty is a third-person, beat-em-up game in a medieval environment developed to showcase skills in simple AI programming and game physics with the Unity3D engine. Die Nasty was developed by myself and a classmate in Fall 2016.
- Gameplay programmer for melee combat, pickup/inventory system, and mouse-camera-aim & controls.
- AI programmer for enemy encounters including proximity based, chase and patrol patterns and enemy combat.
- Environment designer for lighting, NPCs, and particle effects. Programmed player character movement using available animations.
Gotta Get Up (Python, Pygame)
Gotta Get Up was the first game I've ever made. Created in Python and using the Pygame libraries, this project was
inspired by my love of classic album covers and playing guitar.
The game is a side-scrolling action platformer where the
player controls a guitarist who has overslept and must quickly navigate a dangerous path to get to the show on time. It will feature
a bit of tricky platform jumping and collecting guitar parts in order to be allowed entry into the venue.
- Gameplay programmer for side-scroller platformer, pickup/inventory system, parallax scrolling, and moving objects.
- Level designer for three sprawling levels of interwoven album cover landscapes.
- Character, object, and background art assets, sound effects, and sprite-sheet creator.
Side Projects
Unreal Pinball is a pinball physics game demo based on an Unreal Engine course taken at: Udemy
This course explored the use of realistic physics programming, character controllers, UI widget development, particle systems, gamemodes, scoring systems, splines, event dispatchers, and music & sound components.
Arch Vis Room Demo examined the various architectural visualization features in UE4 to create very realistic looking environments, based on an Unreal Engine course taken at: Udemy
Features studied in this course included an UE4 toolset overview, level design, lighting/post-processing, dirt masking, reflection probes, and using the sequencer to create videos.
Metal Dawn was developed in Fall 2015. The game was built in Unity as an introductory project to familiarize our team in developing with a new game engine editor.
Created concept Art for the numerous tank vehicles as well as the game's Logo and Splash Screen. Worked on various documentation including Coding Style Guide, Art Style Guide, and Art Asset Index spreadsheets which described state machines, animation transitions, and reference identifiers to the game documents.
Pinball Attack was developed in Spring 2016 with most of the same team that worked together on Metal Dawn. With a little more experience with Unity under our belts, we were able to build a pinball game with physics, a point system, and unique assets created by the team.
Worked on various documentation including Coding Style Guide, Art Style Guide, and Sound Design Document. Art asset pipeline: Created concept Art for the 3D blockade soldiers and the game's Splash Screen. Worked with the level design and programming team in creating a working prototype of a pinball game
PoolPhysics is another exercise at trying to create physics functions from scratch without the use of Rigidbodies, Unity physics, and colliders.
All assets were instantiated manually at precise positions that allowed our made-from-scratch 'AABB' physics functions to simulate ball collisions and realistic table rail-bounces.
