Some of this is innocent and some of this leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but I got a lot of ambitious prototypes and game jam games done before graduating college. I think it was cool (and in retrospect, impressive) that I spent so much time learning and expressing my interests in games just on evenings and weekends. A lot of garbage had to get out of my system too, both bad habits and bad ideas.

Enneri

 November 2018 – August 2019

Enneri was a narrative project with an emphasis on conversation and level design. The game was meant to foist the player into overseeing the activation of an AI through stages of maturity. The titular character talks with the player about increasingly un-answerable philosophical questions between which the player needs to wander some cool brutalist architecture to gather processing hardware to plug in.

While I still think the idea is interesting, it would need some significant re-evaluation before I worked on it again. The genuine dialogue and surrounding gameplay never quite met – and while the character was one of some dignity, lampshading their compromised pose leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Atavism

December 2017 – October 2018

Atavism was a curious brain-child that was meant to be a long-term project. While it was ultimately cut off because of scope, it became a valuable experiment for teaching myself tons about game development, particularly entities and AI.

The title and concept was meant to sardonically implicate violence as a human behavior throughout history. I cringe just thinking about this, even if it was more developed in my head. Knife fights between guys in masks is problematic.

So the ideas were amateurish and naïve and mostly shitty western fascinations, but I learned a lot. Much can be read on the Atavism Dev Log series. I’m still quite proud of the birds, which revealed my soul the best in retrospect.

Gamejam Games

All posts below remain as-written from their postmortem perspectives shortly after the jams.

Bringer of Brilliance

February 11th, 2018

Bringer of Brilliance is a First Person Action game that I and two friends made during the 2018 K-State 48-hour Annual Game Jam, a jam hosted by my own college where we competed against about 17 other teams to make a game with the theme “enLIGHTen”. Armed with more experience and ambition than 2017, the development process was smoother and more productive, but ultimately far more intensive, but resulted in a good end product that won 3rd best overall. Download Link.

Cursed Dungeon

October 15th, 2017

In October 2017, myself and 14 other students from my University went to Texas for a 48 hour game jam of world record proportions. While production was far more challenging to make than we thought it would be,  many lessons were learned in the development of Cursed Dungeon -“a dungeon crawler with a spooky twist!” Download Link.

FPS Prototype

April 24th, 2017

The FPS Prototype is a demo I finished on April 24th, 2017 after working on it sparsely and on for a few months and ramping it up at the end. It’s original intention was to provide a baseline set of FPS from scratch to provide a foundation for future work. The reason I made it was to share with the K-state Game Development Club for our inaugural “Demo Day”. Download Link.

Khnum’s Emnity

February 12th, 2017

Khnum’s Emnity is a First Person Egyptian game that I and 2 friends made in the 2017 Kansas State University Annual Game Jam. Under the moniker of ‘Armchair Factory’, we hammered this out in 48 hours for the Jam’s theme “Inundation”. Download Link.

Incursion

October 23rd, 2016

Incursion was my submission in the 24 hour KSU 2016 Amateur Game Jam. I made the game itself in GameMaker Studio, the music in Famitracker, and the sound effects in BFXR. The jam was 24 hours, I made the game by myself, and I barely slept at all. Download Link.

Source Engine Maps

I got into game development from Source game mapping. Here are some noteworthy maps – as well as my thoughts on them – left up for posterity. The writings are circa 2018.

Seaside

Summer 2016

Seaside is a Team Fortress 2 map I was working on for the Frontline! community update. It was something I started to do over the summer after the update effort was announced and I needed something to do. I’d been a fan of Hammer mapping for a while now and the update was a great motivator to exercise myself, even if I didn’t continue work on it once the summer was over. Download Link.

Conduit

Summer 2015

Conduit is a Capture the Flag map for Team Fortress 2 that I made over the summer of 2015. I was a Junior-going-on-Senior in high school at the time and this was my main creative focus for the summer, along with my first dedicated effort at making a playable map.

Factory Building

Autumn 2014

I made this factory building using the Half-life 2: Episode 2 version of Hammer in August, 2014. The challenge was to build something based off a reference image, and after I did that, I experimented around with the lighting for fun. There’s not much to it, but it was good practice for environmental design using a reference image.

Contrast

Summer 2014

Contrast is my first completed Source Engine map, something I made for Conterstrike: Global Offensive in 2014. I was a Junior in high school at the time, and wanted to make something that looked kind of nice. While it doesn’t stand up in level design, it was an interesting experiment into environment design.