The assignment for this project was to create, what out teacher called, an “eccentric” game.  Examples of eccentric games are those like Portal and Braid that play with the ideas of space and time.

This game never really got finished.  Instead, what’s presented here (as well as in the improved version of this game) is a short demo, if you will, of my idea for this game.  Essentially, I wanted to create an action/puzzle game that used water to transport the character between two worlds.  The first world would simply be the real world, while the second would be one of the character’s memories and subconscious.  I wanted to implement unique and creative ways and reasons for the character to move between the worlds through the use of both man-made and natural water as well as tell a story through the events portrayed.  Perhaps one day, I’ll end up fully developing the game…  We’ll see.

Let me give a brief description of what is in the game.  You, the character, wake up suddenly.  Everything is black and white and you can hear a weird sound.  Someone is helping you to move.  As soon as you reach what appears to be a door, it slams shut and you snap out of your drunken stupor.  Apparently, you passed out at a party.  You start to walk home as it begins to rain outside.  While you can see straight now, you’re still pretty groggy.  The rain gets harder, and a puddle forms in front of you.  As the puddle gets bigger, you find yourself lost in your reflection.  You travel back to a time before the incident…  Before it all went wrong…

CONTROLS: Arrow keys to move and spacebar to jump.  When you find a puddle, press either down or up to enter/exit the “dark” world.

NOTE:  (Unintentionally,) Because of the way I programmed the game, it runs differently on different computers.  It is possible that it will run poorly on your computer, and this will prevent you from moving past the first area (the black and white part).  One thing you can try is to jump a lot, especially when the character (the cube) is tilting forward.  Jumping like this will cause you to jump forward.  However, jumping is also one of the problems…  Depending on how fast your computer is, jumping heights will differ (the fast your computer, the higher/faster the character jumps).  It is also possible that you may be able to reach the end of the first area during some playthroughs but not others.

Cloud is one of my favorite games that I’ve made.  If nothing else, I managed to get the visual style to look exactly the way I wanted it.

I made Cloud for a project for my game engines class senior year.  The project was to make an abstract game.  At the time, I had been messing around with trying to simulate orbital space physics in Unity.  Basically, I was trying to have Unity dynamically create the orbits of, say, a solar system, only I was planning to do more with it.  I did a lot of experimenting, trying to find a way to incorporate this into the project.  In fact, one really basic game I created, Black Hole, was a result of that experimentation.

Eventually, I came up with Cloud.  It used the method I was playing with in a different way than what I had originally intended (which was good for the project).  It didn’t really turn out to be the best abstract game, but I got it to look and work the way I wanted, plus it was relaxing and fun to play.  Everyone really liked it 😀

The only parts of the game that weren’t done by me are the music and planet/grass textures.

Click the “PLAY” button below to play the game!  Move around with WASD and try to collect the rain particles (the area that collects them is a little bit above the middle of the screen).

(You must have Unity Web Player installed in order to play).

The source code for Cloud can be downloaded here (.zip).

The assignment for this project was to make a “minimal game” in Unity.  I asked myself things like, “What is a game?  What makes something a game?  What’s the most basic characteristic of a game?”  After much thought and in class discussions, I decided to make a game where the only purpose was to get points (a score).  If the player is the competitive type, he or she will most likely try to get a high score, but that goal is not mandatory.  The minimal goal would be joined by minimal gameplay—the pressing of a single button.  What’s more, I decided to make the game visually minimal with the use of only black and white and 8-bit text.

INSTRUCTIONS: Input initials (followed by enter) and click to score points!

This piece was actually just a small exercise the teacher had us do.  I believe the point of the exercise was to just get us to make something in Unity (for many in the class, this was the first time they had used Unity).  Also, to make things go faster, everyone was partnered up.  Since I had experience with Unity prior to this class, I just made this simple game in order to explain the basics of Unity to my partner as well as try out some coding tidbits I had been wondering about.

CONTROLS: Left click or press control to create balls.

This last printmaking project could be whatever we wanted.  I don’t remember how I came up with the idea, but it obviously came from my interest in technology, computers, and programming.

I made a few different designs in Illustrator and Photoshop just to kind of see how they would look, and eventually I stuck with one.  The final print was run through the printer a number of times in order to create the numbers/text on top of numbers/text effect.

This project’s assignment was to create a book.  We were supposed to create a portfolio book, one that we could potentially take with us to job interviews and such, but the book wasn’t required to be a portfolio if we had another idea.  I stuck with making a portfolio.  After we finished designing the book in InDesign, we would send it to site that prints user-made books (I forget the name of the site…), and we would end up with a cool, high-quality book of our own design.  Unfortunately, two things happened to me that prevented my book from being printed…  The first was that the power went out one night while I was working on the design, and I lost everything, and I mean everything; I had to start from scratch.  It was awful.  Eventually, I did manage to recreate what I had and finish the design, but because the book was so long, it would have cost far too much, and, because I was behind from the power outage, it wouldn’t have been mailed back to me until the semester was over.  Thankfully, the teacher understood all of this, and I was able to just turn in the design.  So, with that said, check it out below!