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Programmer specialising in Tools and Artificial Intelligence
I am an aspiring programmer interested in tools, artificial intelligence and procedural generation. I love being able to make game development easier for the designers that I'm working with by developing tools to improve their workflow.
I have so far completed a Diploma of Information Technology at AIE Melbourne, studying C# and C++. Prior to my studies I have been a self taught C# programmer for over 5 years.
I have a big passion for Artificial Intelligence and Procedural Generation as it allows me to tell the computer what to do!
Being able to generate worlds and populate them with AI to play the game is something I love to see and do.
Escaping Project Paragon (EPP) was an end of year assignemnt at AIE Melbourne for our first year of the course. EPP is a stealth based game that requires the player to sneak around guards and escape a cloning and human testing facility. The player has limited movement controls with a walk and sprint. The player also has the option of distracting guards by throwing glass beakers.
Throughout the game, the player will collect keycards that are required to progress though each zone, being careful to avoid detection from guards and cameras around the facility. The player can collect notes around the facility to learn more about where and who they are as well as discover lore built into the world's design.
Listed below will be a collection of other smaller projects I have worked on, these will include tool development and games that I have worked on but may not be quite big enough to justify an entire section on just yet.
One of my new found passions with programming is tool development. I find being able to make development easier for myself and others is satisfying and enjoyable. They often require a different mindset to gameplay programming and I find it gives me different challenges to work through.
Quite often when I'm looking for ideas for developing tools I ask other programmers and designers what sort of tools would they like to see. A design teacher at AIE was discussing how a renaming tool would be very helpful in Unity.
I took this idea up and decided to create an extensive renaming tool as shown in the picture below.
Some of the features this renamer tool offers includes the general prefix and sufix, but also offers a range of 'find and replace', insert at, remove at options as well.
It even includes options for numbering items with the extra option of aligning with Unity's naming standards. The tool also gives a preview of the changes before you apply them.
About 10 years ago, prior to exploring the Unity Game Engine, I got my start making games in Game Maker using the Game Maker Language (GML). This kickstarted my game development journey and led me to where I am today, studying game development and absolutely loving every minute of it, with the exceptional headache of course!
One of the projects I was most proud of was a infinite falling mobile game called Pukken Fall.
I developed this game with the hopes of learning how to build a game for mobile and release something on the Google Play app store. After about two weeks of work I had a finished product that I was happy with. It included a range of customization options and a couple of bosses.
One thing that really fascinated me with games was procedural generation, especially dungeon generation. As a kid I was always excited about learning how it was done.
My first attempt at dungeon generation was in Game Maker like the project above. I had a 2D world where a "walker" would walk through the world, generating hallways and rooms as it went. It was simple in nature but to a younger me, it was incredible that this was something I could do!
Once I grasped the 3D environments possible in Unity, I decided to try out dungeon generation again, this time of course, in 3D! With this in mind I got my brother to develop a few modular pieces, a couple of characters and away I went. This dungeon generator would generate pieces as the characters went along in a top down view. Culling away the previously generated rooms behind it that were no longer visible.
This project also taught me a lot about Unity's Nav Mesh system, using it generate nav meshes at runtime, and getting agents to move along the endlessly generating dungeon. It also allowed me to develop my AI skills further, having the agents running along and fighting enemies as they go.