Status: Finished (in its current form)                                Made with: C++ / DirectX

A strange little game I developed on and off over the last few months - it's a top-down puzzle-ish shooter with short, challenging levels, large enemy swarms and a strange psychedelic insect theme. Featuring ant sacks, pistols, shotguns, beetles, centipedes, pac-man pills and an ever-changing fractal-vomit background.

At the moment: 32 main levels, a centipede boss,  an unlockable Survival Mode, alternate backgrounds, and two other bonus levels that play with the rules & mechanics a bit. 

Very interested in any opinions & feedback - positive or negative ("your game sucks my grandma's anus" is fine :). If enough people like this, I might consider turning it into a larger game. 

Status: Finished                                            Made with: C++ / DirectX

Here's this month's weird project - most of the time went into updating the game engine to support normal-mapped 2D lighting, particle systems, sprite animations, and a free-placement editor I can use for future games. 

I knew I wouldn't have much time for gameplay,  so decided on a  not-so-ambitious "play with ants" tech demo that would put the lighting, animation and particle systems stuff through its paces. And let people do nice and/or mean things to ants. 

Interested to hear any feedback - does it run OK ? (good framerate, no visual glitches, etc.)? Does it change your beliefs about ants? 

Status: Finished                                            Made with: C++ / DirectX

A little prototype game developed over the course of a month - you're a submarine miner attempting to fulfill your life's dream of earning $2,816 in the oceanic mining business. It's a bit of a homage to Terraria and Miner Dig Deep, along with some other random influences - if you know what you're doing it can be completed in about an hour. 

Controls:
   Move: WASD / arrows
   Use selected weapon: Mouse
   Select weapon quickslot: Number keys 1-5
   Choose block for block placer: Click a block in inventory
   Eat Shrimp Snax: Click it in the inventory
   Load/save menu: Esc

Gameplay notes:
Selling Copper Ore, Quartz Ore, and Gold Ore unlocks better drills and items, including a shrimp proximity zapper.
Discolored terrain blocks contain hidden items. 
Gold Drill is the best, and is ridiculously overpowered. 
You get a special reward on earning $2816. 

The main intention was to prototype gameplay and learn a bit about these types of games, so I didn't put much effort into graphics and sound.  If anyone digs it (no pun intended) or thinks it has potential, let me know - I might consider making a larger, more polished version of it down the line with a lot more items, enemies, biomes, gameplay mechanics, etc.

Status: On Hold                                            Made with: XNA

This little "5 month project to be developed quickly like Terraria and be the best game ever" is 5 months in, but still needs like 12 months of work. Which probably means it needs like 24 months of work.  

The idea is a roguelike version of the original NES Metroid, with a different procedurally generated world each time you play. Also permadeath, crafting, unique biomes with their own items / enemies / resources, mining, and some other planned stuff. It was to draw a lot of inspiration from Terraria, Metroid, and The Binding of Isaac. 

I'm torn about it, there's a lot I like about the idea and the game so far. It's got a fancy 2D normal mapped lighting system that I haven't seen in many other games. And the controls and player physics are pretty refined, with help from some kind people on TigSource. My 3D modeling and animation work was slightly less shitty than my previous modeling and animation work.

It looks too much like Metroid though in it's current, early stage - verging on copyright infringement. The tiles I created were for engine testing, based on the original Metroid's "Brinstar" area, and I haven't gotten around to adding new ones. So when I play it I feel a little like an unoriginal idiot, ripping off the original game. Which may not be far from the truth. 

This build is where I left off, at about the 5 month mark. I decided to cut my losses and focus on smaller games, to work on my game design chops and stop betting the bank on giant game projects while I'm still a game design noob. 

Status: Released (on Xbox)                             Made with: XNA, bepu physics

A game I actually finished! Holy shit. It started as a 48-hour Ludum Dare competition entry, a puzzle game made over a weekend. That game was pretty much complete gameplay-wise - then I pimped out the graphics and interface  over 3 weeks, for release on Xbox Live Indie Games. The contest version did pretty well in the judging - voted #81 overall of 1072 entries. 

The "story" is that you're a white blood cell, trying to wipe out a tumor in your host - you have to navigate through 40 levels of vaguely body-like stuff to get there. 

It's got some pretty big flaws, in retrospect - the early levels rely too much on dexterity, rather than puzzle solving, which turned people off, especially on the default Xbox analog stick, which is less precise than the original arrow key controls. As you pass level 15 or so, the puzzles get a bit more clever and interesting, but unfortunately most people said "fuck it" before then. Didn't help that I put the "trial mode" cutoff at around level 15. There's a funny, brutal review from Indie Game Girl on it.  

Still, glad I finished it - and there's a fair bit in there I'm proud of. 

Status: Unfinished                                Made with: XNA, bepu physics

Okay, this game makes me cringe a little bit - the premise is pretty hacky - it's like a 3D Angry Birds, combined with ragdoll self-abuse ala the PS3 game "Pain". This was started around the time that Angry Birds broke out as a mega-hit - I was never all that crazy about it, but thought since it was popular, people might like a game with similar mechanics. I have artistic integrity, I swear!

Combine that Angry Birds hackiness with the Wall Street as the villain - I guess I was sort of trying to latch onto the "occupy wall street" sentiment. That's essentially the premise - you're a blue-collar Greek mechanic guy named Apollo attempting to right the problems in the monetary/financial system by masochistically flinging yourself into crates of money and destroying bank property. There'd be some kind of periodic cutscene where you dump-truck the money out the window to return it to cheering throngs of people.

I spent like 7 or 8 months on it, but the gameplay wasn't turning out very interesting, and all the complex 3D physics and animation programming made for slow progress, so decided to put it on indefinite hold. 

It's an interesting challenge if you play it going for an "A" grade on in each room. Probably too easy otherwise. I have thoughts of maybe finishing it up and releasing it as an XBLIG quickie with lots of self-effacing disclaimers muttered by the protagonist ("I feel like some kind of irritable round bird"). Otherwise I'm not sure.

Status: Prototype                                Made with: XNA, bepu physics

There was this cheesy show called "the Detonators" that I got into for a while, where demolition contractors wired up old buildings and bridges with explosives and then blew them up, with lots of technical discussions along the way about why they used det cord vs. shape charges, the benefits of TNT vs C4, etc. I liked all the technical stuff, I think my brain is wired that way. Incidentally, I also read Boeing technical manuals and fly realistic airline flight sims. So I'm probably on the suspected terrorist list.

Anyway I thought, "this'll make a great puzzle game." You'd be a building demolition contractor, starting up a business. You gotta blow shit up as cheaply and efficiently as possible. With the money you make on blowing shit up, you can buy bigger explosives, new tools, etc. and get bigger jobs. 

So I came up with a prototype. I was thinking, you'd start with jobs to blow up dog houses - the shittiest jobs out there - and work your way up to skyscrapers. Unfortunately, I never got past doghouses and M80's. 

The fatal flaw - too unpredictable.  I got in touch with the programmer of the physics engine and he helped me get it so the simulation behaved completely deterministically with a given configuration of bomb placements - so each "shot" brings all the pieces down in the same way each time. But still, it was mostly chaos and luck. Beyond some basic logic like "put bombs at the base of the building" there wasn't much you could do to influence the outcome, except trying a bunch of random bomb placements. Didn't work as a game concept, at least that my limited creativity could come up with.  

Status: Unfinished                                         Made with: XNA, bepu physics

The first of many bad ideas in my aspiring indie career! The premise: decrepit geriatric Mortal Kombat characters playing air-hockey in dramatic asian kung-fu settings. Each would have special moves and abilities, based around their old age and inability to do anything athletic or martial-artsy anymore. Gameplay would be like the old black-and-white Mac game ShufflePuck Cafe (which me and other nerdy kids used to like to play in the library in middle school) but with new gameplay twists thrown in.

Really, I just wanted to play with shaders. I was drooling at all the fancy 3D graphics on my Xbox, and itching to get under the hood and see how all this stuff worked. So I learned a lot in that respect: normal mapping, reflection mapping, HDR light bloom and tone mapping, cascading shadow maps, and 3D modeling.

I luckily abandoned this one pretty early on. Would have been way too much work on characters, animation, etc. all in service of a game that's essentially Pong. 

If 32 MB takes you more than 10 seconds to download, I wouldn't bother :). Go watch cats on youtube instead.