College Projects

2nd Year - Final Major Project

May 2024

For my final major project at the end of my second year of college, I made a multiplayer, Player VS Player (PvP), Tower Defense/offence game. The map was fully procedurally generated and the game worked through the internet, meaning that the players were not playing locally on the same device. The goal of the game was to defend your castle while attacking other castles, however this had many design flaws with the gameplay loop, which I had to work out before development. This was an insanely difficult project as I had to ensure performance worked over everything else, which can be seen in my documentation.

3D Art - Specialism Project

January 2024

During January 2024, I was tasked with writing up a Specialist Report. I had chosen 3D Art as my main discipline, specifically within the Automotive Industry. My original plan was to create a car chase scene, however due to less than a 1 month time frame, I couldn't create a whole city, cars, car rigs, and cinematics, including VFX and SFX, so I decided to come back to that another time and instead focus on modelling a car.

Uncharted Style Tutorial Level Blockout

December 2023

For this project, I was tasked with creating a tutorial level based off the famous franchise, Uncharted. I initially created a story based off revenge and wrote that down in multiple documents, including my Game Design Document and Visual Level Design Document as shown below. I then proceeded to do some research on actual gameplay and context behind the uncharted games. This went well and I gathered some neat information that aided me when creating my own project for example, the parkour system from "Uncharted" but the tutorial mechanics from "Prince of Persia", as well as the visual style from "Tomb Raider". I ended up learning and utilising some skills I learnt over the summer holiday, such as using world machine tool to create a massive landscape, however I did learn a lot as well, I created my own drag and drop tutorial system, Refined my Cinematic skills, Learned how to create my own Car Rig for animation, A road spline system, Using a much more advanced plugin for weather and day/night cycle unlike my original system around a year ago. 

Final Major Project (FMP)

June 2023

Prior to this project, I had used Unity around 2 to 3 years before this time. I understood how the engine worked and I could code in C#. I wanted to progress all my skills further so I ended up using this project to improve my Unity knowledge as well. However, instead of creating an actual game for this project, I chose to make fundamentals, or in other words, a framework for a possible future game. This can in some cases be called Gameplay Programming or I could be doing the same jobs that a Gameplay Test Engineer would do.

The different systems that I would need are Movement, Staircases, Teleports, Dialogue, Choices, Jumpscares, Shadows, Depth Priority and 2D Texture mapping (Normal maps, emissive maps and anything else necessary for a high quality 2D game). This was a long project, and I carried out everything from research, to production, to evaluation. I have also shown the documentation I created for this specific project below.

If I had to change something with this project, it would be to create a larger level with a bit of story, or maybe some sort of 2D Cutscenes to help with that. However I felt that I had genuinely pushed myself and this was just as good as each project I had done, and once again, added more skills to my skillset.

Action RPG Game

March 2023

This project was about developing skills in cinematics, VFX, SFX and learning others code. I was given an ARPG template to build upon, and had to do quite a few things. Firstly, I made a level, however, I wanted a challenge and to build upon my previous skills, therefore I used blender again to create different walls and a door. Next, I Imported those walls and doors into Substance painter and textured them to give a dark theme, bear in mind I had a small story in mind for the game. I created the level using the low poly assets I had made, however since the texturing was so well done, it didn't look low-poly at all.

I ran into another issue at this point however, I didn't have enough time to texture the floor, so I ended up learning a new skill and helping others with it as well, the TextureVariation Node in Unreal Engine Materials. This allowed me to use small amounts of dithering as well as noise and fractures in materials to create a fully randomised material that does not have repetition and works with world-alligned tiling, This worked very well however, bear in mind that this is not always going to work in every design, which I soon found out in other peoples projects.

However this was me solidifiying my previous skills, like environment art, coding, VFX, Music Production. I learnt new skills as well, Main one being Cinematics, as well as some other skills, like narration, video editing within Unreal Engine, Subtitles and finally Voice Dubbing.

The idea behind this project was to research into 3 contexts of my choice, eventually developing a level for one, I ended up going a step further and learning a lot of skills. The list of skills I learnt are: Modelling in Blender, Texturing in Substance painter (Including different texture maps), Gameplay programming in Unreal Engine (Making a moving vehicle), Creating a Day/Night/Weather/Time Cycle (using basic particle effects), Cloth Simulation, Moving Maze Walls and finally Networking (As well as network packet management)

This was the project I had a lot of freedom with in my opinion, however I had a scope that was too large for me and only had two things left to complete, The rules of the game that allow the rounds and scoreboard to work, and lag management. During this game I had a problem with lag, however, after working on another project involving networking with physics based vehicles, I discovered the problem was that there was no Network Prediction interface.

Below you can also see the whole documentation as well as the process I used to make it.

Tank Trouble Remake

November 2022