Projects and Career related
Below is my career path and a series of various projects and things I’ve been involved in, mostly relating to software development or game making, since that’s my passion.
End of 2021 Update
The year’s coming to a close. This year, I participated in three game jams and a solo game dev project, plus got promoted to a permanent full time position as an IT Analyst II - Performance Tester. It’s not game dev related, but it’s been good for the interm. Hopefully I can make it back into game dev soon! The game jam games were a blast to make and all three were unique and rather high quality (for a game jam game). I made “Socks and Found”, “Light House” and “The Last Dodo”. The first was my first attempt into using Unity to make a game, all during a game jam. We made a slightly buggy game, but we did make a complete short experience! Light House was me returning to Godot for a game jam with a brand new team and just making something. We made a short puzzler game about redirecting light. And The Last Dodo was another Godot game where I learned how to use the animation tree player and revisited tilemaps, as well as making a boss fight with a giant Dutch robot. The solo game dev project, Star Shooters was mostly finished this year, though I have a teeny bit of polish to do before I publicly put it up on itch. I went through a lot of learning for that project as I had to learn how to setup every system myself and connect everything, all while trying to keep it maintainable for a solo dev over the course of the year.
Pandemic Days
With the COVID-19 pandemic, vrCAVE went into hibernation and I found a position with Alberta Health Services. There I worked initially as a IT Analyst I - Software Tester, but took on roles under the performance team due to a lack of manpower there. Which was great, because I got to learn a ton about bash scripting in a practical environment, even if it was mostly me trying to figure out better ways to do the same work. While this wasn’t as games focused, I’ve still been trying to do Game Jams on the side and practicing programming wherever I can. Borbot would come to exist at the end of 2020.
Graduation and vrCAVE
When I graduated in 2019, I was fortunate enough to find a position with vrCAVE as a junior game programmer! Seriously, they’re awesome, check them out. I helped develop and program The Time Travel Paradox release, as well as porting all the previous Escape rooms to the Oculus Quest! These are some really cool technologies and I highly recommend trying out VR. Because it’s really cool. Unless you get motion sick easily. But even then, maybe for a short period of time. Since we work in VR, framerate is suuuuper important to minimize motion sickness, so I spent tons of time learning about the profiling tools in UE4 and optimizing elements of our game as we ported it to the Oculus Quest to make sure we were hitting that 72+ FPS.
Read more about my work at vrCAVE here!
Fragments
To finish the Game Development Certificate in my final semester, Winter 2019, I took the capstone course which focused on making a game from start to finish in one semester without any hand holding! From here, I lead a small team to make Fragments!
Read more and download the game here
Git Emotional
I participated in the 2019 HackED at the University of Alberta! I worked together with 3 other brilliant students to build a tool that tracks the sentimental state of a Github repository based off commit messages!
StarCraft 2 Bot - “SegFault”
Over the course of the Fall 2018 semester, working in a team of 4, we built a StarCraft 2 bot (named SegFault) from scratch and competed against other teams in the class. Our bot placed 2nd out of 10.
Black Soul
Over Spring/Summer 2018, myself and 4 friends set out to make a 30-minute game prototype. Black Soul was the resulting outcome.
Read more and download the game here
OneShot
Over Reading Week in November 2018, I sat down for 48 hours in a team of 4 to build Oneshot, a short game using Godot 3.
Read more and download the game here
Outdoors Club Database
In Fall 2018, I worked with the University of Alberta Outdoors Club to create a rental application to reduce the waste of paper and help simplify the Outdoor Club’s workflow.
Research Assistant - Information Extraction
In Summer 2018, I worked under Dr. Davood Rafiei to extract facts and information from article-based corpea.
Lost Light
In Winter 2017, I worked in a 6 person team to build a 30-minute game over the course of the semester using RPG Maker VX Ace. We went on to win an award and had a pretty sweet game too!
Read more and download the game here
Project Attitude
During Winter 2017, I worked on a 5 person team to build an android application similar to Twitter but for moods instead!
DragonQuest
In Fall 2017, I made an adventure game using Twine 2 in a six person team. The primary constraint was that it had to be a text-based game.