Games Portfolio
This section of the site covers anything that's video game related: Old demos as part of my portfolio work, as well as more recent information of stuff that's currently in the pipeline. You can find more content that didn't make the cut for here on my YouTube channel.
Dr. Shambles - C# & Unity3d - Google Play & App Store
An Android/IOS game that I made using the Unity3d game engine. It was originally available on both Google Play and the App Store, however due to being busy with other commitments I haven't yet renewed my Apple developer account. I happen to like how it turned out, but unfortunately no amount of ASO (app store optimization) will help move it away from the bottom of the search listings, so hardly anyone has downloaded it. I don't have large sums of money to chuck at marketing it, so if you could try the game out then that would be fantastic. And better yet, if you like what you see, please share a link to it with your friends and family ^_^
Tower Defence - C++ & DirectX
A game demo I made as part of my games portfolio work after leaving university - over 10 years ago... I added lots of features that weren't ever fully utilised, like custom map loading and pathfinding (A* search algorithm), but overall it came out okay. I made a custom particle engine for handling the special effects, the menu system is constructed as a pretty basic finite state machine, and the UI elements are all configured from data files (no fancy editor or toolchain for positioning UI elements I'm afraid, it had to all be from scratch). It was designed as a showcase for my ability to program in C++ and DirectX, and so I didn't use any additional third party libraries (not even the C++ Boost libraries, not that I would have really utilised them - skimming over the code reveals I didn't need to do reference counting at the very least). On a related note: I had written a 2D platformer demo in C++ and the Allegro library back in college which may make it's way onto this page if I manage to find it (I submitted it alongside a short write-up for my first year university module on Windows Programming, so I got some usage out of it ^_^).
Pacman Clone - C# & XNA
This demo was intended to showcase a faithful representation of the ghost AI of the original Pacman game, as per the Pacman Dossier. The AI was fairly easy to recreate using a finite state machine, with a bit of fuzzy logic here and there for the specific ghost behaviours. If you watch the video, you'll even notice me exploiting the AI of Inky via head-faking (0:29). I haven't attempted to mimic the mechanical aspects of the game, such as the pixel precision on the collision, or quirks like the speed increase with early cornering, since I couldn't really spare the time. Writing the demo in C# with the XNA framework allowed me to concentrate more on the AI, and less on the boilerplate, which was a nice relief after the headaches incurred of working with raw C++ and DirectX on other projects.
A* (A-Star) Pathfinding - C# & XNA
Since I'd already written an A* pathfinding routine for Tower Defence, and it wasn't really utilised, I decided to create a quick demo in the XNA framework showcasing it. Porting it to C# was fairly straightforward, as was creating a basic editor UI for modifying a 2-dimensional space. I decided to avoid adding explicit UI controls, and decided to simply bind the controls to the specific keys instead; Thankfully back then UX for tablets and phones wasn't really something I had to think about...