The Odyssey

The Odyssey was developed for IAT 410: Advanced Game Design at SFU. Typically, this course involves working in a team of four to develop a Unity game as a semester-long project. However, taking this course in my last semester, I wanted to culminate all the skills I'd learned in the program and attempt to create a game entirely on my own, tackling everything from programming to 3D modelling and animation to music.

I proposed a procedurally generated couch co-op multiplayer roguelike game, largely inspired by Risk of Rain 2, Unrailed, and Hades. Naturally, some features had to be scoped back over the course of the semester, and I wasn't able to spend as much time as I would've liked on aspects like sound and music, but ultimately I am very proud of this project.

It features low-poly 3D modelling in Blender, my first attempt at rigging and animation, multiple levels and types of enemies, a sandbox mode, 17 pieces of unique loot, 3 magic spells to learn, environment generation, a dynamic split-screen implementation for up to 3 players, and much more. Apart from the iconography on runes and trailer music, this project was entirely my own and I received a very positive response during the project showcase. Additionally, I was selected to present The Odyssey at the 2023 FCAT Undergraduate Conference.

If you'd like to read more in-depth on the process of creating this project, we were tasked with keeping a weekly game development blog over the course of the project which I'm happy to share here. You can also download and play the game below!

Defenders of Delta

Defenders of Delta was a personal project I developed during the summer and was my first Unity game! Coming from a Java background, I felt right at home with C#, I just had to get over the hurdles of learning how to use the interface and how Unity's systems work with each other. This is a tower defense game with a playable character that has to physically place towers and get in the action with their own bullets as well.

In terms of features, I didn't want to get too into the weeds of learning 3D for this project, so I settled with creating some basic voxel models with little animation. There are multiple types of turrets and power-ups to buy, as well as good enemy variety. Down the path you'll see enemies that shoot back at you, cheat by cutting across the path, hack your turrets to shoot back at you, cast spells, can only be destroyed by bombs, and more!

The thing I'm most happy about with this project is actually the original soundtrack and custom C# dynamic audio implementation. There are 8 different pieces of music, each with 3 different segments: a “chill” arrangement that plays between waves of enemies, the “main” tune that plays during the action, and a transitional jingle that musically links back to the “chill” arrangement. Calculations using the playback time and tempo of the music are used to sync the start/stop of music pieces to seamlessly playback different pieces of music at appropriate times during the game. Here's an example set:

Compared to others I've made, this game is surprisingly addictive— try it here!

Scribbage

Probably the most technically complex project here is Scribbage. It was heavily inspired by the Jackbox Party Pack series: web-enabled party games typically played with phones that allow for rich user interaction with the game. I wanted to create a game where players could draw original characters on their phones and watch them battle each other on the big screen. The project consists of three separate applications: the desktop game that provides the visual experience to the players, the web-app that players use on their phones to connect to the game, and a server application that facilitates game instances.

Web-App

To connect to the game, players navigate to a static webpage styled using Bootstrap and written in plain JS that connects to the aforementioned server application using a websocket. This page allows players to join the game with a particular room code and player name, and once the game begins, players can draw a roster of characters to fight with, specifying their names, stats, and more.

Desktop Game

The visual experience comes from a desktop game written in Java which uses Processing as a graphics library and websockets to connect to the server app. No game engine was used. The desktop game sends and receives data from the server, such as for creating a game instance, receiving a unique room code to display on the screen, and getting the image data for the characters users draw. The game shows the characters battle to death with turn-based combat in an up to 16-player double elimination tournament bracket where players can sit back and cheer for their original, often goofy creations.

Server

Joining our two above programs together is the server application, written in Java using websockets and currently hosted on an AWS Lightsail instance. It's a generic application that can be used for any web-enabled party game, not just Scribbage. It allows games to send room creation requests, supplying them with a unique code that can be shown on screen for the players to enter when connecting on their phones. The user applications can connect to these instances, allowing the server to facilitate communication between the user devices and the game. The server permits the game to broadcast data to all players or unicast to individual players, allows “dangling players” to reconnect to the game if their connection is lost, and provides a set of success and error codes (e.g. name in use, lobby doesn't exist, player limit reached, game lobby closed, etc.).

My friends have had a blast playing this game and I was really happy with the technical feat I had accomplished at the time. For release to the public, I would like to rewrite this game in Unity for the sake of performance and ease of adding new features, as well as touching up the server application to be more scalable and secure. Maybe a project for the near future!

Duel Net

If you're familiar with Dueling Network, then you'll understand what Duel Net is. It's a card game simulation— that is to say, the rules of the game aren't programmed into the actual app, it simply provides an interface for the mechanics of the game to be played out and for cards, deck, etc. to be managed. I created Duel Net so I could play a personal card game with friends that involves summoning minions, playing spells, and rolling dice to determine the success of combat.

Duel Net is a set of static pages built with Bootstrap and plain JS, using websockets to communicate with a Duel Net server application written in Java that facilitates game instances. Before playing, users can build a deck(s) using the deck builder. Players can use the card search to quickly find cards to add to their deck. Decks can be added, removed, renamed, duplicated, and imported/exported using unique deck codes. Decks are saved to the user's local browser storage so accounts are not required (of course, this has drawbacks as well but for the personal use case this was appropriate).

Once players have made their deck(s), they can navigate to the Play page and can create, join, or spectate a game lobby. When creating a lobby, players can specify the name of the lobby, an optional password needed to join, and any number of cards they want banned from this lobby, which will forbid players from picking decks containing those cards. The lobby creation request is sent to the Duel Net server application and will display the lobby in the joinable list once it has been created.

The server application manages all of the data in-game. Once playing, users can draw cards, play cards, move cards to different piles, deal damage to their opponent, specify cards for attacks, flip a coin, roll different types of dice, and chat with their opponent. The server application also manages visibility of information, as certain cards should only be viewable to certain parties (e.g. face-down cards).

Campus Cannons

Campus Cannons was developed for IAT 359: Mobile Computing and written in Java using Android Studio. The final project for the course was fairly open-ended, requiring an Android application with a certain number of activities and either GPS or camera implementation. I decided to make a game in the vein of Pokémon GO where the GPS would determine the player's position in the game world using their real world position around the campus of SFU Surrey. The game itself would be simple, with the player being a pirate who's sailing around fighting NPC ships, gaining gold and experience, and buying new cannonballs at hubs placed on key points around the campus.

The above screen is the overworld map where the player's position on the grid is determined by their coordinates on campus. This uses the Processing core library for graphics. You can see random NPC ships sailing around, which are able to be tapped on the engage combat. You can also see an example of a hub, located in SFU Surrey's mezzanine, where weapons can be purchased.

Cannonballs are available with a variety of prices and stats. Mapping out these hub locations was a fun, but time-consuming process. I recall spending an hour or so walking to different parts of campus, sitting down for a bit and averaging the incoming coordinate data as the location API wasn't particularly precise on the scale of individual rooms at that time.

The gameplay, also using the Processing core library for graphics, is fairly straightforward. Players can tilt their phone forward and backward to change the trajectory of their cannonball, then hold and release on the screen to fire the cannonball, with the amount of power behind the shot determined by how long they held before they released. The NPC ships simply fire back their own cannonballs periodically with a certain amount of damage and chance to miss depending on their level.

My instructor and TA were both very happy with the work I had done and I ended up receiving an above-perfect grade on the project. It was enjoyable to make a game that incorporated a lot of new things for me, like mobile development and GPS integration.

Breakdown Buddy

Breakdown Buddy was a Discord bot I wrote in 2018 using the Java Discord API for the custom chart scene for the dance rhythm game ITG. The bot provides two main services. After creating a #breakdown_buddy Discord channel for the bot, you can drag and upload a .sm file into the channel and the bot will quickly spit out an analysis of the chart. .sm files are used by ITG to represent note data for custom songs (i.e. the timings for where arrows line up with different parts of the music, as well as song metadata). This analysis contains lots of information, like the density of notes, frequency of certain named patterns of arrows, a summary of the length of stream/break sections of the song, and more (the nitty-gritty of this would take a fair amount of explaining). It also includes a note-density graph which details the easy and hard parts of the chart at a quick glance, like this:

The bot also allows you to query a static database of existing popular custom charts by song title/subtitle and lookup the aforementioned information quickly without having to have the file on hand. There's additional functionality, like storing user preferences for different degrees of chart analysis and hiding certain metadata (such as hiding the song title to prevent spoilers for usage of that chart in an upcoming tournament).

The bot has been updated a fair number of times since 2018, with only infrequent changes made nowadays. I used to run the bot off an old laptop many years ago; it's been moved to an AWS Lightsail instance now and sees about 10,000 queries a year on average.