i used to try to make games, so i'm starting a thread to collect some of those ideas and prototype stuff from my history.

this first one was one of the first games that i worked on enough to like...... envision a world where it became a real thing that i actually released. i called it SUNKEN and it was an underwater base-building game i was working on back in 2013 while in college. this was before i learned Unity or anything so this was built in Java with libgdx and an ECS library called Artemis, which I believe is now defunct?

this was basically my "build a Dwarf Fortress-like" attempt. i don't think this game would have even been fun had i finished it.

some things i built here that were insane:

• A power distribution system that required wiring up utilities to power generation and storage.
• Structural integrity simulation which could result in overly large rooms breaking and flooding.
• Water flow simulation to handle cases where the base gets flooded.
• Oxygen consumption and generation - people consumed oxygen, plants create a little, fire consumed a lot.
• Redstone-style logic circuits.

this thing was kind of where i cut my teeth on trying to really build a whole big game by myself, and even though it never got "finished" i still have fond memories of it.

this was a game i started for a gamejam and never finished. the idea was that you were a cube with a different character on each side, and you'd tumble through a roguelike dungeon. each character had different attacks, so depending on what face was up you'd do something different.

aside from being completely unplayable from a game design perspective, this was where i learned what quaternions were, because trying to handle the cube tumbling with euler angles fucked me up.

i think this was also built in Java/libgdx.

this was my attempt at making a traditional fantasy roguelike. i called this one Lore of Rune Era, or LORE, in the vein of things like TOME.

the gimmick of this one was that the character was a wizard who could equip various spellbooks, which would all be procedurally generated and have a few spells each. the spellbooks even had generated unique covers, which is a thing i showcased in a separate project here. i also did a lot of spritework for this, which was fun.

this was my first big Unity project, and i ended up building a bunch of tooling for myself as part of it, which was simultaneously 1) terrible for a solo project as i ended up spending more time doing that than making a game, 2) great for my career as a gamedev on larger teams, as i think a tool-centric, data-driven approach is one of my strengths.

after i gave up on LORE, i started on another roguelike called Card Lords of Clockwork Kingdom, or CLOCK, using what i had learned on LORE in terms of building out the core of a traditional roguelike.

the gimmick of this one was that the enemies were all clockwork machines that would spring to life when you got near. you couldn't hurt them at all, but they'd wind down naturally after a set number of turns, so your powers were based on either pushing them away or rewinding them in time (which would move them away from you but also give them back turns).

also it was a deckbuilder? i think maybe this was right after Slay the Spire came out.

i did once try to build a pokemon

this used a lot of the same tech (either ported or rebuilt) from my roguelike projects. got a basic explore-battle-capture functionality built out, but not much further.

the monsters themselves i had designed to be more folklore/mythology themed, so there was a Satyr starter, a Baba Yaga starter, and a knight/dragon starter. i only really made those 9, and i didn't really work on this project for very long.

i'm sad i don't have more gifs of this because i think it was pretty cute and there's a lot that i'm not showing off here.

this was a game about being a cat that lives in a space ship, which you could drive and decorate and stuff. the hilarious joke of it was that things moved using physics, so if you started accelerating the ship too hard everything would fly to the back and tumble around.

i've talked a bunch before about how i have a fascination with the idea of being able to build a little cozy home in a vehicle and this was me trying to build that into a game.

i also had some very rough 2D circular gravity stuff for running around on planets. it, and the character, just moved via physics, which made it feel terrible and work terribly, but you could run fast enough to reach orbit, so that was cool. i hadn't really worked out how to build a character controller at this point.

i used to try to make games, so i'm starting a thread to collect some of those ideas and prototype stuff from my history.

this first one was one of the first games that i worked on enough to like...... envision a world where it became a real thing that i actually released. i called it SUNKEN and it was an underwater base-building game i was working on back in 2013 while in college. this was before i learned Unity or anything so this was built in Java with libgdx and an ECS library called Artemis, which I believe is now defunct?

this was basically my "build a Dwarf Fortress-like" attempt. i don't think this game would have even been fun had i finished it.

some things i built here that were insane:

• A power distribution system that required wiring up utilities to power generation and storage.
• Structural integrity simulation which could result in overly large rooms breaking and flooding.
• Water flow simulation to handle cases where the base gets flooded.
• Oxygen consumption and generation - people consumed oxygen, plants create a little, fire consumed a lot.
• Redstone-style logic circuits.

this thing was kind of where i cut my teeth on trying to really build a whole big game by myself, and even though it never got "finished" i still have fond memories of it.

this was a game i started for a gamejam and never finished. the idea was that you were a cube with a different character on each side, and you'd tumble through a roguelike dungeon. each character had different attacks, so depending on what face was up you'd do something different.

aside from being completely unplayable from a game design perspective, this was where i learned what quaternions were, because trying to handle the cube tumbling with euler angles fucked me up.

i think this was also built in Java/libgdx.

this was my attempt at making a traditional fantasy roguelike. i called this one Lore of Rune Era, or LORE, in the vein of things like TOME.

the gimmick of this one was that the character was a wizard who could equip various spellbooks, which would all be procedurally generated and have a few spells each. the spellbooks even had generated unique covers, which is a thing i showcased in a separate project here. i also did a lot of spritework for this, which was fun.

this was my first big Unity project, and i ended up building a bunch of tooling for myself as part of it, which was simultaneously 1) terrible for a solo project as i ended up spending more time doing that than making a game, 2) great for my career as a gamedev on larger teams, as i think a tool-centric, data-driven approach is one of my strengths.

after i gave up on LORE, i started on another roguelike called Card Lords of Clockwork Kingdom, or CLOCK, using what i had learned on LORE in terms of building out the core of a traditional roguelike.

the gimmick of this one was that the enemies were all clockwork machines that would spring to life when you got near. you couldn't hurt them at all, but they'd wind down naturally after a set number of turns, so your powers were based on either pushing them away or rewinding them in time (which would move them away from you but also give them back turns).

also it was a deckbuilder? i think maybe this was right after Slay the Spire came out.

i did once try to build a pokemon

this used a lot of the same tech (either ported or rebuilt) from my roguelike projects. got a basic explore-battle-capture functionality built out, but not much further.

the monsters themselves i had designed to be more folklore/mythology themed, so there was a Satyr starter, a Baba Yaga starter, and a knight/dragon starter. i only really made those 9, and i didn't really work on this project for very long.

i used to try to make games, so i'm starting a thread to collect some of those ideas and prototype stuff from my history.

this first one was one of the first games that i worked on enough to like...... envision a world where it became a real thing that i actually released. i called it SUNKEN and it was an underwater base-building game i was working on back in 2013 while in college. this was before i learned Unity or anything so this was built in Java with libgdx and an ECS library called Artemis, which I believe is now defunct?

this was basically my "build a Dwarf Fortress-like" attempt. i don't think this game would have even been fun had i finished it.

some things i built here that were insane:

• A power distribution system that required wiring up utilities to power generation and storage.
• Structural integrity simulation which could result in overly large rooms breaking and flooding.
• Water flow simulation to handle cases where the base gets flooded.
• Oxygen consumption and generation - people consumed oxygen, plants create a little, fire consumed a lot.
• Redstone-style logic circuits.

this thing was kind of where i cut my teeth on trying to really build a whole big game by myself, and even though it never got "finished" i still have fond memories of it.

this was a game i started for a gamejam and never finished. the idea was that you were a cube with a different character on each side, and you'd tumble through a roguelike dungeon. each character had different attacks, so depending on what face was up you'd do something different.

aside from being completely unplayable from a game design perspective, this was where i learned what quaternions were, because trying to handle the cube tumbling with euler angles fucked me up.

i think this was also built in Java/libgdx.

this was my attempt at making a traditional fantasy roguelike. i called this one Lore of Rune Era, or LORE, in the vein of things like TOME.

the gimmick of this one was that the character was a wizard who could equip various spellbooks, which would all be procedurally generated and have a few spells each. the spellbooks even had generated unique covers, which is a thing i showcased in a separate project here. i also did a lot of spritework for this, which was fun.

this was my first big Unity project, and i ended up building a bunch of tooling for myself as part of it, which was simultaneously 1) terrible for a solo project as i ended up spending more time doing that than making a game, 2) great for my career as a gamedev on larger teams, as i think a tool-centric, data-driven approach is one of my strengths.

after i gave up on LORE, i started on another roguelike called Card Lords of Clockwork Kingdom, or CLOCK, using what i had learned on LORE in terms of building out the core of a traditional roguelike.

the gimmick of this one was that the enemies were all clockwork machines that would spring to life when you got near. you couldn't hurt them at all, but they'd wind down naturally after a set number of turns, so your powers were based on either pushing them away or rewinding them in time (which would move them away from you but also give them back turns).

also it was a deckbuilder? i think maybe this was right after Slay the Spire came out.

i used to try to make games, so i'm starting a thread to collect some of those ideas and prototype stuff from my history.

this first one was one of the first games that i worked on enough to like...... envision a world where it became a real thing that i actually released. i called it SUNKEN and it was an underwater base-building game i was working on back in 2013 while in college. this was before i learned Unity or anything so this was built in Java with libgdx and an ECS library called Artemis, which I believe is now defunct?

this was basically my "build a Dwarf Fortress-like" attempt. i don't think this game would have even been fun had i finished it.

some things i built here that were insane:

• A power distribution system that required wiring up utilities to power generation and storage.
• Structural integrity simulation which could result in overly large rooms breaking and flooding.
• Water flow simulation to handle cases where the base gets flooded.
• Oxygen consumption and generation - people consumed oxygen, plants create a little, fire consumed a lot.
• Redstone-style logic circuits.

this thing was kind of where i cut my teeth on trying to really build a whole big game by myself, and even though it never got "finished" i still have fond memories of it.

this was a game i started for a gamejam and never finished. the idea was that you were a cube with a different character on each side, and you'd tumble through a roguelike dungeon. each character had different attacks, so depending on what face was up you'd do something different.

aside from being completely unplayable from a game design perspective, this was where i learned what quaternions were, because trying to handle the cube tumbling with euler angles fucked me up.

i think this was also built in Java/libgdx.

this was my attempt at making a traditional fantasy roguelike. i called this one Lore of Rune Era, or LORE, in the vein of things like TOME.

the gimmick of this one was that the character was a wizard who could equip various spellbooks, which would all be procedurally generated and have a few spells each. the spellbooks even had generated unique covers, which is a thing i showcased in a separate project here. i also did a lot of spritework for this, which was fun.

this was my first big Unity project, and i ended up building a bunch of tooling for myself as part of it, which was simultaneously 1) terrible for a solo project as i ended up spending more time doing that than making a game, 2) great for my career as a gamedev on larger teams, as i think a tool-centric, data-driven approach is one of my strengths.