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Game Jams – Birthday Taxi and Pitfall Panic

Overview I made two final games to finish out 2020. It’s an interesting pair of games. In my opinion, Birthday Taxi is my worst game and Pitfall Panic is my best. In this post I’ll focus on what went wrong in Birthday Taxi and what went well in Pitfall Panic. Birthday Taxi Birthday Taxi by […]

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Game Jams – Galaxy Gauntlet and Twisted Twilight

Overview Continuing on with game jams, I’ve completed two more games, Galaxy Gauntlet and Twisted Twilight. Despite the intentions expressed in my previous post, I didn’t stream the development for either of these. This is mostly due to reasons I discussed in that post, I just wanted to make rapid progress and didn’t want to […]

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Game Jams – Sleepy Tower Defense and Nested Catapults

Overview I kept up with game jams, doing three jams in a row. This post is about the first two of those games, Sleepy Tower Defense and Nested Catapults. I’ll talk about the third game, Orcs and Doors, in a future post. These games are now available on Newgrounds and GameJolt as well as itch. […]

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Game Jams – Torchlit Run and Treasure Rush

Overview After finishing up The Construct Quarter, I had to take a break from game dev to work on some other stuff. I was finally able to get back to working on games recently and I decided to start with doing a bunch of game jams. Game jams require you to make a game in […]

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Construct Quarter – Postmortem

Construct Quarter Project Page Overview This post reflects on a few aspects of the Construct Quarter project with the benefit of hindsight towards the goal of learning and improving my next project. Specifically, this will focus on my Patchwerk Prototype, Hero Data Framework, and overall goals for the Construct Quarter and the extent to which […]

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Construct Quarter – Bosses

Construct Quarter Project Page Patchwerk Patchwerk was the first boss I implemented. His relative simplicity makes him a perfect first boss. I was worried that the initial state of the hero values would lead to this fight being too difficult and it would take a while to tune the difficulty. However, I was pleasantly surprised […]

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Construct Quarter – Heroes

Construct Quarter Project Page This post goes over the heroes I implemented in the construct quarter. This will include a description of their abilities and some notes about their development.In general, I was less concerned with faithfully keeping to World of Warcraft as source material for my heroes. I wanted to use Reforged’s high quality […]

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Construct Quarter – Part 4: The Rest

Construct Quarter Project Page First Fight The next milestone after the first heroes was implementing the remaining heroes and a rough but complete version of the first boss fight, Patchwerk. I added another tank, another healer, and three additional damage dealers for a total of eight heroes. I’m going to go into the heroes more […]

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Construct Quarter – Part 3: First Heroes

Construct Quarter Project Page New Heroes After creating a hero framework, the next step was actually creating some heroes. I finished the Blademaster, Beastmaster, and Holy Priest. I set up the framework to support different types of actions that spells could execute when cast but had not yet actually implemented those actions. I therefore had […]

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Construct Quarter – Part 2: Hero Data Framework

Construct Quarter Project Page Overview I said in the previous post that my next goal would be creating a spell framework that makes the addition of new spells as easy as possible. Towards that end, I’ve created a framework that automatically sets up units and their abilities from input data. Abilities Although this system also […]

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Construct Quarter – Part 1: Research and Toolchain

Overview I made the Patchwerk Prototype specifically to prepare myself for making this project. It will implement at least the same five heroes and three bosses that are actually balanced. You can see the new project page here. My ideal target was getting this finished right as reforged comes out. Reforged comes out at the […]

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Patchwerk Prototype – Part 4: More Heroes and Patchwerk

Overview Patchwerk Prototype Project Page Just implementing Patchwerk wasn’t much, so I added two new heroes to this segment as well. This will also be the last segment. I now have access to the Warcraft 3 Reforged beta, so I’m going to begin work there. New Heroes The two new heroes added were Frost Mage […]

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Patchwerk Prototype – Part 3: Healing and Implementation

Overview Patchwerk Prototype Project PageThis got done way later than I expected but I lost some of some of August and all of September diverted away to some other work. But I’ve finally finished the balancing scripts for healing and implemented the first set of calculated values into Warcraft 3. Healing Healing was a bit […]

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Patchwerk Prototype – Part 2: Cooldowns and Damage

Overview Patchwerk Prototype Project PageOnce again design work is harder than I thought it was going to be. Before this point, abilities had arbitrary placeholder values just so I could confirm their implementation was correct. Values like cooldown duration, damage/healing dealt, and mana costs will be hugely impactful. However, there are far too many values […]

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Patchwerk Prototype – Part 1: Initial Heroes

Overview Having recently finished EcoSim, I wanted to start a much smaller scoped project. Warcraft 3 Remastered is coming out later this year, and I’m pretty excited for that. I’m gonna try my best to make a mod for it as soon as it comes out. Ideally I’d like to be able to push out […]

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EcoSim Postmortem

Intro This post is mainly for reflecting on the decisions made during this project to take away lessons that can be used in future projects. For a description of the project and its development, check out EcoSim Timeline. Lulls in Progress As a whole, EcoSim took a little bit over a year. My first commit […]

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EcoSim Timeline

Overview EcoSim is the first project I’ve worked on since finishing college. The main goal I had for EcoSim was to tackle a sizable project that didn’t have an externally enforced deadline, practicing the habit of working on games after work and committing to seeing the project through to an end. I also wanted to […]

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New Project Pages Added

I’ve recently added a few new project pages. You can get to them from the top navigation bar or from the links below. I’m mainly making a blog post so it’ll show up on the homepage. Feral Moment Shadow Mapping Image-Based Lighting Edge Rendering

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Feral: The Rest and Retrospective

I finished feral quite a while ago now. As one might be able to guess from the timing of this post, it did not pan out as planned. However, I thought it would still be useful to talk a bit about how the remainder of the project went. Development up to this point I want […]

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Falcor Page Added and Website Update

Apologies for not having posted in a while, Feral was a ton of work till the very end so I never really had the opportunity to post more about it. I would have posted about it after the project finished, but I started work on some new projects almost immediately. I still intend to put […]

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Feral: Prototype Milestone

Our team’s Prototype presentation was a bit over week ago on 11/3. This milestone is one of the most difficult in Project classes because of the short amount of time from the previous milestone teams have to progress on their projects. The ideal goal for this milestone is to have thoroughly prototyped your game concept […]

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Feral: Engine Proof

Our team’s engine proof presentation went pretty well, although it was over a week ago on 10/7, I wasn’t able to write a post about it the weekend after the presentation because in preparing for the presentation, I neglected some other homework that I needed to race through after the presentation in order to get it […]

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Feral: Summer Development

I haven’t posted anything in a few months, it’s been a really busy summer. I took summer classes, continued working as a tutor at DigiPen, and worked at DigiPen’s summer camp, ProjectFUN. In my free time, I began work on the graphics engine for my junior year game project, which currently has the working title […]

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Pogo Pug Complete

Our team finally finished and submitted our game for grading. There wasn’t too much new stuff added to the engine this milestone, we mainly focused on making the game as polished as possible and meeting certain technical requirements for the project associated with the class. If you’ve read my previous updates, you might remember I […]

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Ninjacade’s Level Editor

This information was originally hosted on the Ninjacade Project page, but I wanted to clean up that page so I’ve moved it here. Although another team member was originally responsible for the level editor, he left our team mid-semester and therefore an editor needed to be created incredibly quickly. To leverage already existing systems like […]

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Ninjacade’s Graphics Engine and Art Pipeline

This information was originally hosted on the Ninjacade Project page, but I wanted to clean up that page so I’ve moved it here. This was the first graphics engine I ever created. Graphics Engine Ninjacade’s graphics engine was built on OpenGL 3.3, and uses shaders rather than fixed function calls for increased flexibility and scalability. The use of […]

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Pogo Pug: Alpha Milestone

It’s been a few weeks since the pre-alpha milestone. Our team recently gave our alpha milestone presentation, so it seemed like a good time to talk about what I’ve been working on in the game for the past few weeks. For me, this milestone was entirely about visual polish, with an emphasis on actually using […]

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Pogo Pug: Pre-Alpha Milestone

I haven’t updated my website in a while due to being pretty busy with my spring semester at DigiPen, but with my first project milestone coming up I decided to do a short post about it. Typically, during the second year and on, DigiPen students work on year-long projects. However, as I mentioned on my Ninjacade page, […]

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Duelyst: CCG Meets Tactical RPG – Part 2 : The Tactics Perspective

I recently made a post about the collection and meta card game aspects of Duelyst. In this post, I’m going to focus on the actual tactics gameplay that takes place within your typical match.   Positioning One of the most central aspects of any tactics-style game is positioning, and Duelyst is no exception. Where you’re allowed […]

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Duelyst: CCG Meets Tactical RPG – Part 1 : The CCG Perspective

Duelyst is a Kickstarter Project by CounterPlay Games that’s a somewhat unique mix between Collectible Card Games like Hearthstone and Tactics RPGs like Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics. As a big fan of both of these genres, Duelyst immediately appealed to me. When I heard it had entered open beta, I was excited to give it a […]

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Website should be up and running

Although my website is currently very bare-bones and minimal, I think I covered all the bases and hit all the basic things I needed to do. There are still some kinks to work out, like gifs not auto playing on the AWX page, but at least I’ve got all the basics set up. Hopefully there […]

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