I've made a lot of games. I've even finished a few. Here are some of the ones I'm proud of.

A Forgery of Light and Dark

August 2022
The banner for A Forgery of Light and Dark

Created for YeegJam V in seven days, A Forgery of Light and Dark is a dead-simple painting game where you work against the clock to replicate the painting shown to you using only circles and squares. You can make your life easier using the money you earn from your forgeries to buy upgrades in the shop.

The cool part

The most fun I had while writing the code for this project was probably the canvas system. In my (very brief) preliminary research into drawing in Unity, the most straightforward solution I saw was to use a Texture2D to represent the image and handle all the drawing procedures. I went down this route because it was fine enough for a jam game, but I ultimately regretted doing it for a number of reasons.

While on first glance the game looks polished, make no mistake: it's unfinished. What the game possesses in polish it lacks in content. It only takes ten minutes to unlock everything and the scoring system is too generous in some places, too stingy in others. I'd like to revisit this game someday and fix the nasty bits because it genuinely does have soul, but for now it's just a fun little jam game that I made in a week.

Shader Raider

June 2021
The banner for A Forgery of Light and Dark

I can't remember exactly, but I think this was one of those games whose idea came from the name. And to be fair, 'Shader Raider' is kind of a cool name. The idea is simple: collect as many coins as fast as possible to increase your score. When you die, or when time runs out, you are graded based on your performance.

The hook of the game is the four (?) collectible power-ups scattered throughout the map. Each one enhances your movement ability in some way (think more speed, double jump, et. cetera) while also applying a screen-space effect to the camera. The more you collect, the higher your score, and the more powerful you become. The shader effects stack, however, leaving you all but blind by your fourth item. Unlike A Forgery of Light and Dark, Shader Raider's grading system is overly fastidious in its evaluation of your coin-collecting ability.

For what it is, the game is pretty fun. I definitely enjoyed making it and am eternally fond of its strange but endearing aesthetic. I remember not wanting to bother with editing a cubemap, so I slapped on some built-in Unity material that wasn't made for external use, let alone a skybox. That funny-looking skybox ended up being the basis for Shader Raider's artstyle.

Troll Physics

April 2021
The banner for A Forgery of Light and Dark

The development of Troll Physics was a fever dream. It was my first solo Unity game, and I think I put it together over the course of three days. I honestly don't remember. Troll Physics was inspired by I Wanna Be the Guy, Celeste, and kaizo games in that order. Or rather, what I thought I Wanna Be the Guy, Celeste, and kaizo games were without having played them.

For my first actual, honest-to-God solo gamedev project, Troll Physics' development was surprisingly uneventful. Just about every feature I wanted made it in with no hassle. This game was a success in that it taught me Unity and game programming at the expense of game design and polish. I wanted Troll Physics to be a rage game with a lot of challenging platforming and troll sections, but it ended up getting nerfed into oblivion out of fear that my friends wouldn't want to play it otherwise. For a game with none of the bells and whistles of traditional platformers (think coyote time, input buffering, etc.), the movement is surprisingly tight. I think the instant acceleration makes up for everything else since, even if the game is inconsistent, at least the controls aren't floaty.

I ended up updating the game to add more levels and mechanics over the next month or so, but lost interest after a series of Unity serialization bugs corrupted a few of my levels. Godot is by no means a perfect engine, but at least it never irreversably corrupts your files when renaming them.

TR0LLSEC

August 2020

TODO