Mini Mech: Exterminator

Mini-mech is a comical top-down shooter where 1-4 players take control of tiny robots used to rid homes of insect pests.  The art and effects were made to give it an old-school comic book feel with bright colors, exaggerated bug characteristics, and things like "SPLAT" and "CRUNCH" popping up over slain bugs.

I was technical lead of this 5 month academic project with a team of 7 programmers, 2 artists, and 2 producers.  As the technical lead I created or approved a majority of the code architecture, managed the programming tasks, and was a liaison between the artists and the game.  A few of the major programming tasks I handled myself were:

• The rendering system with asset management in Direct X
  
• The animation system with animation blending, partial model animations, and procedural joint movement
• HLSL shaders for lighting, effects, and procedural alpha of objects.
  

Dream 'scape

Dream 'scape is a side scrolling platformer with a unique surreal art style.  The player controls a thought in a dream that is coming to an end as it's owner wakes up.  The longer the thought can avoid the deteriorating dream world the more likely it will be remembered and live on.  The name is a combined word play on "landscape" and "dream escape".

This was a 48 hour game created for the Global Game Jam(GGJ) 2011 by a small group of programmers and artists.  The GGJ theme was "Extinction" so we thought up a unique way to incorporate it and then designed and programmed this quick game.  My major contributions to this were:

• The particle system allowing variation in start point, velocity, color, size, duration, and more, customizable through a LUA script.
• Platform generation using pieced together image parts (platform size, platform symbol, platform corner, etc) and based on LUA loaded parameters
• 2D rendering system with Direct X
• Parallax scrolling with multiple backgrounds