PROJECTS
Here's a collection of some projects I've worked on, whether they were for classes, jobs, or just things for fun.
Game and Programming Projects
UPCOMING HORROR GAME (C#, Unity)
I recently began writing up a vision canvas and script for an upcoming horror game that I plan to release to itch.io and Steam within the next year or two. I will not officially begin art/programming development until I've implemented most of the features I want Tower of Baybayin to have, nor do I want to release many details about the project, but I will say I'm very excited for this game!!
AETHERTECH (C#, Unity)
For the 2020 Global Game Jam in early February I made some new friends onsite and formed a game jam team to create aetherTech, a point-and-click simulation game in which you are a tech support agent in space assisting other space travelers and galactic governments. My primary role was one that was new to me, which was writing. I also helped plan out some of the gameplay elements, and contributed some C# scripts as well.
Download/View aetherTech GGJ page View aetherTech GitHub files
TOWER OF BAYBAYIN (C#, Unity 2D)
Tower of Baybayin is a personal project I am currently working on and began work around 3/10/19. This game is conceptually the same as my previous project, Hiragana Game, but instead is created in Unity 2D rather than GameMaker, and tests players on Baybayin (Precolonial Philippines writing system) rather than hiragana, a Japanese writing system. Currently the game keeps score according to your number of correct answers and ends when the tower of Baybayin characters extends above the bounds of the screen (approx. 8 characters in the player's queue). Other features in this app such as Baybayin history pages and lessons, feedback on characters that cause difficulty for players, and the ability to change the pool of characters in the game are currently in development. I had the privilege of debuting this game at imagineNATIVE 2019 in Toronto, Ontario. More information can be found here.
Download/View Tower of Baybayin files and alpha game footage
PIANO PRODIGY (QA work)
My university professor, Dr. Dana Dominiak, provided me the opportunity to contribute to The Prodigy Factory's game Piano Prodigy in the form of QA testing and documentation. In my time working on the game in this manner I was able to identify and document several game-breaking bugs along with some more minor ones, with most found by adjusting (and abusing) the gameplay settings.
AUNT MARY'S STORYBOOK (PHP, Ruby on Rails, CodeIgniter, HighCharts)
AMSB was my Senior Capstone project and an application of service work through code. AMSB, a project of the organization Companions Journeying Together, is a program in which incarcerated parents are recorded while reading a book for their children, and then the recording and book are provided to the children. The Capstone team consisted of myself and two other students. Given an existing website and database, our assignment was to correct issues and add desired website features as outlines on the project's Github. We also wrote documentation and other general information on the code in a Github wiki. Prior to this project, I had very little web development experience and no PHP knowledge at all, so the project was incredibly daunting at first. But after lots of reading, experimentation, and trial and error, I was able to solve a couple given issues independently!
CACTUS KID (C#, Unity 2D)
Cactus Kid is an infinite runner game I worked on for the Lewis University Hack_Flyers hackathon. I worked on it with two others, who were in charge of art assets, and I did the programming and assembling the game in Unity. It's certainly not the most polished thing in the world as we worked on it in under 12 hours (for example, upon colliding with an obstacle the game window closes rather than the character taking damage or bringing the player to a game over screen), but I learned a lot and even won third in the contest.
HIRAGANA STUDY GAME (GML, GameMaker)
This is a simple little game that I put together as a study tool for my Japanese class. It's still in development but it is currently playable. Some features I plan to add are a scoring/high score feature, enabling or disabling certain characters and character groups, improved graphics, and a basic menu system.
KLUMP TOWER (C++, JSON, Webfoot Frog Libraries)
Klump Tower was the class project for Video Game Programming II. In this course, all students collaborate as one team to work on a single game due at the end of the semester. I was assigned to completing a variety of art-integrating related tasks for the game.
I frequently contributed to discussions and ideas for the game, especially those relating to platforming and game play elements. I presented a vision canvas used in my Gamebuilders organization in the past to help keep everyone on the same page. I also converted PSD GIF files to PNGs, organized the file system, wrote in code for the images in a JSON file, and wrote C++ code to load in the images.
PONG (C++, Webfoot Frog Libraries)
This game was one of the projects for my Video Game Programming I course. It is a recreation of the game Pong in C++, using the debug console as scoring output. It also features a (deliberately) completely useless and silly feature of the player paddle being able to move in the x direction as well as the y direction.
CHARGE (Unity)
Charge is a game I worked on as part of a research opportunity at the University of Illinois during the summer of 2016. This was an existing game idea proposed by another in which a character named Quark could manipulate their environment and their own body by drawing in positive or negative charge, which would affect their movement and position. The purpose of this game is to introduce basic electromagnetism concepts to school-aged children in a fun interactive educational manner.
For the project I contributed a variety of ideas for game play and platforming elements. I also created a level in the Unity editor. For a while I also worked with a Leap Motion controller and attempted to write controller code for it, however after running into a number of issues with the controller the team decided to shelve the idea of using it.
MINECRAFT MOD RESEARCH
This one isn't a single project per se, but also in the summer of 2016 I worked on another research job at the University of Illinois. I worked with Dr. H. Chad Lane in a few ways to contribute progress and research on setting the foundation for eventually creating an educational Minecraft mod.
MOVE YOUR WAY: VIRTUAL REALITY (Unity)
Move Your Way is a VR game targeted at children with cerebral palsy and dystonia with the intention of physically rehabilitating them in a fun and immersive way. Today it is being modified and added to by another team, but when I worked on it it was a connect-the-dots type game that took place over four levels. Original plans were to use a robot arm to track user's movements, but upon submitting the project we used Leap motion. For this project I researched sensory rooms for the sake of relaxing players and designed the environments in Unity.
VR@ILLINOIS video featuring Move Your Way (shown and discussed at 0:16 and 0:29)
SQUIRRELLA WARFARE (Blender)
ACM Gamebuilders at UIUC hosted a game making hackathon in which all participants contributed to the same project, Squirrella Warfare. This game was a humorous third person shooter in which squirrels battled each other. During the hackathon I was assigned to making weapon 3D models, so I learned how to use Blender during the event and made a couple assets.
BURGERMAN (Gamemaker)
My very first game I ever made when I was about 9 or 10. Unfortunately I never saved any of the files because younger me thought it wasn't very good, though it was pretty cute.
One afternoon when browsing the internet I came across Gamemaker and was interested in trying it out. I drew all the assets myself in MS Paint and programmed the game with the drag and drop features. Burgerman consisted of a single start menu, and then about 4-6 'levels.' Originally I wanted the game to be a traditional platformer, though I didn't know how to draw walking frames so I made him fly instead. Then I realized I didn't fully understand how to make a level challenging in any way, so I just put a bunch of random walls everywhere. And of course, I placed a bunch of cheeseburger sprites all over the levels for Burgerman to collect. That was essentially the entire game; there was no sense of difficulty or challenge in the slightest, but it marked the beginning of my interest in game development and programming.