I’ve been working in Unreal Engine 4 for about 4 months now and I’ve started to get the hang of things. Progress on my Action RPG is coming along very nicely if not slowly at times. I’m really happy with a number of the systems I’ve built, my inventory system and my character controller in particular. The game has started to become a sort of fusion between Dark Souls and Sacred 2. I’m obviously overscoped at this point but its more of exploration project than something I expect to finish any time soon. That being said I do plan to take things as far as I can go and I’ll probably start looking into finding some artsy types to collaborate. I want to start showing off some of my work on the site once I get the game looking a little more presentable.

Another thing, LD40 is coming up in a few weeks and my current plan is to participate in the Jam event with my brother and a few friends. Even though I’ve started to become accustomed to UE4 myself, I think I can develop faster in Unity. I imagine the rest of the team will prefer it anyways. I’m hoping to take things in a very different direction this time around.

Well, Ludum Dare 39 is over and despite some issues with the LD site, my game is submitted. I wasn’t sure what to expect going into the competition but I managed to not only complete a game, but I think that its kind of fun!

Introducing…Delivery Drain

The theme this time around was “Running out of power”. It didn’t take me long to fixate on the idea of centering the gameplay around conserving the power on your cell phone – a situation I seem to constantly put myself in for one reason or another. I decided to create a game where you would need to navigate around a randomly generated city using the map on your in game phone like a traditional mini-map. Using the map would drain the battery of the phone so you would have to be conservative with its use. I didn’t have an entirely clear picture of what the actual game was going to be but I didn’t want to waste a ton of time so I got to coding right away.

The first night consisted mainly of the city generation and some very basic artwork. I got the car driving around the city constrained to a grid and hooked up some player input before going to bed. I had the entire day Saturday to work on artwork, the delivery system and most of the UI. Sunday afternoon was then spent on sounds, music and bug fixes. I also added a couple last minute features like difficulties and road construction.

Overall I had an absolute blast and I’m really happy with what I managed to produce by myself in just a weekend. The next step is to play and review other peoples entries. I will make a post showing off some of my favorites in the next week or two.

Tonight kicks off the 39th Ludum Dare contest. Ludum Dare is an online game jam where you have to create a game from scratch over the course of a weekend. I have decided to participate in the Compo portion of the contest where I will have to create a game entirely by myself in only 48 hours. This includes all of the programming, artwork, sound and music. Game engines are allowed though so I plan to use Unity. The contest officially kicks off at 7pm mdt with the announcement of a theme that everyone will have to design around.

This will be my first time doing anything like this so I have no idea how things will end up but I am excited to see what I can do. On Sunday night I will upload my game here on the site for anyone to play so please check back then. I will also be playing a ton of games that others create for the contest so I will post some of my favorites here!

Good luck to all of the contestants!

Now that the site is live I wanted to give everyone a quick update on what I’ve been up to.

First and foremost, I want to let everyone know that you can play my game Artswiper right now! It is a small minesweeper inspired game that I made with my brother last month. The game isn’t completely finished yet so feel free to let me know if you find any glaring issues. Please excuse the programmer artwork, I did it myself and I am well, a programmer.

Before deciding to make Artswiper, my brother and I had been working on an adventure game. I don’t want to give too many details right now but we made a basic prototype of the game in Unity. As the scope of the project started to explode we decided to put it on hold to give my brother a bit of experience with the entire game making process. We wanted to spend a few weeks making a small game completely from scratch and so that’s what we did. It has been a great learning experience for the both of us but we are anxious to get back to our main project now.

We made the decision to switch development of the game from Unity over to Unreal. I am currently in the process of converting most of what we had in the prototype over to the new engine. When I have a working build of the prototype running in Unreal I will make another post to show some of my progress.

It looks like you have stumbled across my brand new WordPress site!

Welcome!

This will be a place for me to share my thoughts and to show off my existing or upcoming work. You can find links to some of the games and music I have helped to create so please take a look around! If you have any questions then feel free to contact me in the way most convenient to you, links are at the top of the page. If you want to know more about me or find a link to my resume then click the about page.

The site is still in the process of being finished up but I should have most of the kinks worked out in the next week or two.

I don’t have much else to say right now but stay tuned as I continue to work on the site and add new projects to my portfolio. Thanks for coming by!