Hi! I'm an independent game developer based in Brisbane. I mostly work in Unity, but also dabble in other engines. I'm very experienced at programming in C#, writing shaders in HLSL, modelling in Blender, and pixel art in Aseprite.

Currently hanging out in the Screen Queensland Games Residency.

Neat things I've made:

Nostalgic underwater 3D platforming

Reefglider is a short 3D platformer where you play as Wattle, a sugar glider helping the citizens of the reef. Made in 5 weeks a 4 person team, my responsibilities included game design, programming, tech art, writing, music, and Steam deployment.

The quick turnaround presented a lot of interesting problems, but served as a great crash course for everything that's involved in releasing a game to Steam. I'm quite proud of how polished the final product came out.

Check out Reefglider on Steam

Cool fish with daddy issues yearns for space.

Dead Fish is a puzzle game for the Gameboy Color that sees you helping Sebasstian recover his scattered mixtapes so he has something to listen to on his rocketship when he journeys to Fish Planet, meeting a cast of other charming fish-like characters along his way.

The player only has a limited number of flops on land before Sebasstian just fucking dies, so they must be strategic with how they navigate.

The game was made in 4 days by a team of 3, I was responsible for game design, programming, and parts of the level design.

Play it on itch.io

Spooky vibes on the Gameboy

The Curse of Lake Pineview is an RPG that I made for the Gameboy Color in 72 hours for the Ludum Dare game jam. Made using the GB Studio engine, the entire game and all of its assets were made by me within that 72 hour window. This includes character sprites, tilesets, music, UI elements, and dialogue. On top of this, it includes a novel battle system that is mechanically similar to blackjack.

Implementing the battle system within the hardware limitations of the Gameboy, as well as within the limitations of an engine that doesn't necessarily have any support for doing turn based battle systems was a good challenge, and I'm real proud of how it came out.

While the game does look awesome running on a real Gameboy, it can also be emulated and played right in the browser.

Play it on itch.io

Extraterrestrial Witness Response

Secret agent immersive sim (WIP)

This is a project that I've been chipping away at on-and-off for a couple of years. You play as a 1940s government man-in-black tasked with At it's core, this is a game that focuses on player agency and emergent gameplay that comes out of the interactions of various open ended game systems. Heavily inspired by immersive sim games such as Deus Ex and Dishonored.

This project is too large for me to ever realistically finish by myself, and as such is more treated as a sketchbook of sorts for me to apply design, programming, modelling, and tech art skills. It is being made in the Unity engine. Below are some breakdowns of how some of the mechanics in the game have been implemented. All of the art, design, and programming that you see below was made solely by me, with the exceptions of the red mannequin model, and some of the environment textures.

Abductor Ray

One of the player's main tools is the Abductor Ray. Based off of secret UFO technology, the Abductor Ray can abduct objects then shoot them out. Mechanically, the Abductor Ray is lifted straight out of an old university project, but with some tweaks that help recontextualise it in an immersive sim.

At it's core, the Abductor Ray is a toy that empowers the player to take any gameplay element out of whatever circumstances they find themself in, and plonk it back down somewhere else whilst retaining it's current state.

Whilst this could look as simple as picking up a box and putting it somewhere else, it also opens up a lot of opportunities for the player to interact with all the game's other systems. For example, picking up an object that's on fire and using it to spread a fire to somewhere else, abducting someone angry and putting them in a room full of badguys to do your bidding, or just throwing someone through a plate glass window.

Fire propagation

Props and objects in the game can catch fire, spread fire, and burn out. This spreading behaviour is completely dynamic, allowing the player to take different physics objects in the game and use them to set other objects on fire, as can be seen in the video where the player takes a flaming test cube and uses it to set the living room couch on fire. Every flammable object defines how resistant it is to catching fire (controlling how quickly the fire will spread), and how much fuel it has (how long it can burn for).

Some other neat things worth noting in this video- as objects burn, the amount fuel they have left is intuitively communicated to the player by how crispy the object appears. You can also see that when the burning cube is sucked into the abductor ray, the flames on it freeze and stop moving. This is to tell the player that they don't have to worry about objects burning out while they're stored inside the abductor.

Light meter

One of the key factors to stealth in the game is how visible you are to other characters, and this is mechanically represented to the player by their light meter- a simple bar on their HUD that goes from 0-3 notches of brightness.

I wanted this brightness level to always feel accurate to what the player sees of the world around them. This made for an interesting technical challenge when considering that the entire game is dynamically lit, with the player able to shoot out fixtures, switch off lights, as well as considering how the player may be lit by flaming objects or their own flashlight.

My solution is to incrementally render a low resolution full 360 equirectangular view of the world from the players position and take an average of all the pixel values in the resulting image to determine how much incoming light the player would be receiving. The equirectangular projection has the added bonus of over-representing things at the poles, which correlates to what is directly above and below the player mattering the most, i.e. are they standing in a shadow, or are they standing directly under a light. There is some technical finesse in getting this to run fast and to pass data back from the GPU to the CPU without making everything slow down, but the result is a very performant light meter that will always respect the way the player is interacting with the world around them, whether that be shooting out lights or hiding in shadows.

UI design and programming

Having previously worked in UI/UX design, I had a strong motivation to leverage this skillset to make the UI in this game as shiny and polished as possible. I believe that clunky UI can very easily cheapen a game in the mind of the player so making nice UI was important to me.

The game is set in the 1940s, so I opted to go for an art deco theme for the UI. The assets were all designed in Figma before being imported into Unity. If you look to the videos of the weapon wheel and the note popup, you can see the culmination of the high resolution assets, curved animations, as well as post processing effects on the background all coming together for a crisp and clear smoothly animated HUD.

Puddle shader

It was important to me to give the rainy city streets an authentic look, but because I'm only one person I needed to be able to do this without hand authoring all of it. This video shows a ground made up of multiple materials all sharing a surface shader written in HLSL that takes in tileable PBR textures and plonks down some puddles on it.

The textures are projected in worldspace so they always tile seamlessly across different objects without any need for unwrapping. Similarly, there is a large cloudy noise texture shared across all the materials projected in worldspace to dictate the shapes of puddles.

The presence of the puddles is influenced by vertex colours, allowing me to concentrate them in gutters as seen in the video. They are also driven by the geometry's normals such that they will form on flat surfaces but not on sheer walls. After combing the noise, the vertex colours, and the normals, we're left with a value of 'puddliness' for any given pixel. This value is then multiplied by a heightmap, which is what gives the appearance of the puddle filling all the nooks and crannies in the asphalt and the sidewalk tiles. This final value is compared to a threshold value to decide if the pixel we're looking at is either a puddle or not a puddle. If the pixel is a puddle, we simply ignore our normal map and crank the gloss all the way up, giving the appearance of out final puddle.

The tileset and cute animated mushrooms were drawn and provided by the always-talented Eden Takenaka

Platformer Prototype

What you're seeing here is a prototype made in Unity for a little throwback platformer with movement designed to make the player say 'Wow, this is so tight and responsive!'

I was responsible for the design, programming, character art, animation, and particle effects.

Aside from the physics of the character itself, one of the main focus areas for achieving this was in the character animation and how it's used to communicate information to the player. The animations on the player character are intended to provide immediate visual feedback to the players actions, and also act as a way to inform the player of the current state of the character.

For example, when the character reaches the exact peak of their jump they will change pose and point their leg forward, telegraphing to the player that this is the ideal moment to go for a double jump. When the player does not have a double jump ready to go, the character can be seen flailing his arms and legs, implying that they have less control over the jump now.

Particular care was also given to the dynamic camera and the way that it balances framing anything that might be important to the player at any moment whilst also moving gently and not being nauseating when the player is doing big double jumps and ground slams. The camera can act completely dynamically, as seen in the first video, or I can otherwise place down boundaries to explicitly define rooms and spaces for the camera to stay within.

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Zac Dickinson