Game Jams
THINGS I DID IN MY SPARE TIME
SPACE GEMS
Solo developed a match-3 puzzle game, focusing on SOLID principles, tween and easing animations, and matching logic.
In retrospect, I would approach match detection using a flood fill-style algorithm to simplify the logic and improve maintainability of the code.
To support replayability, I implemented board shuffling using the Fisher-Yates algorithm, ensuring consistent randomization on restart. I also developed my own lightweight tweening system to drive easing-based animations without reliance on Unity's heavier tools like the animator or timeline. This gave me more control over the animations.
I built a match-3 puzzle game from scratch. The focus was quick animations to give clear visual feedback. A key challenge was reliably detecting matches regardless of shape or order. I solved making the board a 2D grid with cells linked to its neighbors. Cell traversal was done recursively until each gem sequence ended.
Link: itch.io
Platforms: Itch.io
Tools: Unity, FMOD
Team Size: 1
Collaborated in a team of 3 to develop a 2D infinite runner platformer in Cocos Creator during 48-hour game jam.
Link: itch.io
Platforms: itch.io
Tools: Cocos Creator (TypeScript)
Team Size: 3
ONLY ONCE YOU LIVE
I also tuned the jump and platform spawn timing to achieve a consistent feel as difficulty increased. Using Cocos Creator's physics systems, I applied an initial jump velocity and adjusted gravity based on the player's vertical velocity to shape the player character's jump arc more precisely. This allowed me to align platform spawn timing with the player's movement. It led to a familiar jump that felt good regardless of the difficulty.
In a team of three, I was the only programmer. We opted for the Cocos Creator engine to make a browser-based game for the game jam. Since the engine lacked discrete "key press" events, I implemented a custom input system to track key state transitions and ensure reliable jump input.
OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS
- Animation & trigger events for proprietary scripting language
- Animation synchronization
- Cutscene implementation
- Dialogue scripting
- Texture memory optimizations
AWARDS
Apple Arcade Game of the Year 2022
Apple Design Award (Inclusivity) 2022
Gayming Awards, Best LGBTQ Indie Game 2023
Australian Game Dev Awards, Excellence in Ongoing Games & Excellence in Narrative 2023
OTHERS
PROJECTS FROM GITHUB
PROJECT LOVECRAFT
Link: Github
This was a 3-member team effort to create top-down dungeon crawler for a 7-day game jam. Time constraints prevented us from submitting the project, but I was able to implement a procedural dungeon generator and implement a simple behaviour tree for enemy AI.
TWEEN LIBRARY
Link: Github
I created this lightweight tweening library to learn about linear interpolation and easing functions. It was successfully implemented in the Space Gems project (above). Unity GameObjects were animated through Effect objects and managed by an EffectBuilder that multiple effects could be fed into. The github page shows examples of its usage.