May 12th, 2012 — Professional Work
Hate it or love it, BurgerTime deserved a proper modernization. Fans from the series will enjoy the retro yet modern feel of this game.
I worked on this game much later in its development cycle, but I was able to finalize more of the engine/certification requirements to get this game out the door. Please check this game out, at least download the demo and try out the new awesome take on BurgerTime!
May 12th, 2012 — Professional Work
This post is really late, but since ScaryGirl just recently came out on Steam I figured now is the time to update my website.
ScaryGirl is the first real action/platformer that I worked on from start to finish. I spent a little more than a year working on this project. My main focus was player controls, the swing/tentacle mechanic, and combat. I also got to do a bunch of other things on the project as I manged the code team from working on developing shaders, designing the camera, inventory, save system, and working on environmental hazards. This game looks beautiful, the art team did an amazing job! Working with Nathan the creator of ScaryGirl was also a dream come true. He is an amazingly smart and creative person that I hope to have the chance to work with in the future.
Check out this video review, of course we want a perfect 10, and we always work torwards that goal, but a 7.5 from IGN is still really good.
May 22nd, 2011 — Code, My Work
I was recently tasked with a new system to handle any number of combos. Basically it needs to be easy to define a given combo and easy to fire off an event when that combo is successful. Starting off I had 27 various combos with 13 different attack types. For example ( Light hit, Light hit, Light hit ) would be one combo. First I wanted to define the limitations of the combo system.
Once a combo has been reached the attack chain is cleared. For example ( Light hit, Light hit, Light hit, Uppercut ) would be 1 combo with the first 3 hits and then the chain would be cleared, and uppercut would begin the next sequence. This is important because the designers need to be aware of the types of combo’s they define. If it was absolutely necessary to extend the combo, I think it would still be possible, but my solution wouldn’t work as well, because a person could in theory just do light hits constantly and be notified of a combo.
February 13th, 2011 — My Work
This update is a little late, but Jam City Rollergirls has released on WiiWare on January 24th. This marks my 6th shipped title and 9th that i’ve worked on. This game has been receiving very positive feedback from the reviewers and the fans of derby. Check out these reviews!
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/25081
http://wiiware.nintendolife.com/reviews/2011/01/jam_city_rollergirls
It seems like the biggest complaint is the lack of content, which is completely understandable for a WiiWare title. We did as much as we could to cram content into the 40mb game, and to be honest it feels good that people just want more of what we were able to make. This was a very challenging title to work on because there are literally no references for roller derby games. What we did is look at what other similar “arcade” style games did well and we wanted to bring that together with the world of roller derby. I mainly spent my time working on player controls, their interactions with the environment, and the powerups. The controls went through so many major iterations that I feel confident that anyone can pick them up and play immediately. I also worked hard to design and implement the concept of stealing points from your opponent, to me this makes for a very dynamic local coop game. Stealing points is a tough thing to balance, but it works really well with calling off the jam and using other powerups to avoid being hit. I’ll do a more detailed post on this maybe a post mortem on a later date.
Oh yeah check out this interview I did
September 7th, 2010 — My Work
I’ve been working really hard on several projects, while still trying to play some games (Starcraft 2). Anyway i’m currently messing around with the Unity Game Engine on some home projects that i’ll hopefully be able to share soon. Also I’ve been working hard on 2 professional projects here at work that are coming to a close, and i’m getting ready to roll onto another project that I’m super excited for. You can check out one of the announced projects for WiiWare right below this post. I am in this industry because I love games, challenges, and learning, so I will continue to share what I’ve learned on my website.
September 7th, 2010 — Professional Work
Coming to WiiWare Q4 2010
I don’t know about everyone else, but i’m a huge fan of Kart racers like Mario Kart and Diddy Kong Racing! After working to combine elements of Kart racers with Roller Derby, we’ve made a very unique game that everyone will enjoy playing. If you don’t know much about roller derby, don’t worry we’ll have a pretty robust tutorial to get you up to speed. Working on this game has been pretty challenging, mainly because of the size limit that WiiWare titles require. We want to put so much into this game that sometimes it doesn’t seem possible in 40MB. With that said, it does allow us to focus on gameplay, which is where this game is going to shine. In the meantime check out this interview done with the designer on my team, and yes he really is that crazy 
http://pc.gamezone.com/videos/item/jam_city_rollergirls_interview/
May 24th, 2010 — Code
Determining if a point is in a 2D triangle
Visual Studio 2008 Project and Source here
For this one I needed to read in a file of a ton of triangles and then process them to determine if a point is contained in the triangle. I thought of a couple different algorithms to solve this but ultimately decided to use the cross product between the generated segments to determine if it is contained. I had been needing a basic File class for reading and writing files, so I set one of those up, then I moved to the 2D integer vector class that I used for the math needed to solve it. The parsing is very basic I just scan for the integers, then i sorted the points from left to right so I knew how to process the triangle.
Anyway check it out and leave some feedback.
May 19th, 2010 — Code
A lot of the problems that I keep attempting on projecteuler.net require more bits than than unsigned __int64, so I started thinking about making my own LargeInt class. For the particular problem I’m solving I need the following operators.
I need to be able to have numbers of nearly infinite size with fast indexing to perform operations on. I decided to utilize the vector class in the Standard Template Library, but you can pretty much use any dynamic array. Continue reading →
