This was the first Game Jam I ever did, as well as my first time using Unreal. The theme of this Game Jam was "Duality."

I was in charge of the level design. The player gets to see two versions of the castle from different perspectives. As such, I had to keep the camera angles in mind since an open path from one perspective might obscure the player's goal unless they switch.

The original idea for the game was that you played as a chaotic entity tasked with placing judgment on the king. The idea was to affect the player's decision by showing them two sides of the king, the one praised by the people for his exploits that improved society, and the one who had to be ruthless as a leader. The goal was to have the player pass judgment on the king based on what they saw.

However, as one can tell, this was way outside our scope for a 48-hour game jam, so we tried to design a basic prototype in terms of mechanics. We ultimately got second place.

Instructions:
Open up the Unreal project and go to the "Content" folder, open the "Maps" folder, and select "Persistent Level." Run the project from here. It's a little buggy on new versions of Unreal, so just stop and run it again if the character falls through the floor.

Controls:
WASD for movement.
Space bar for jumping.
"E" for changing perspectives.

This was my second Game Jam project that I worked on. The theme was "Machina", which was open to participants' interpretation.

I was given the role of programmer and level designer. This was my first experience with RenPy, a text adventure engine used for the video game, "Slay the Princess." 

I was in charge of basic-level design and programming. I was able to pick up the language pretty quickly because it's an offshoot of Python, and many of the operations were pretty easy to program for.

Our team was able to have a polished demo of the game, despite having lost 6 hours of work the night before the Game Jam ended. Most of this is due to the fact that visual novels are easier to implement than Unreal projects. As such, being the only team that used RemPy, we placed last out of two other teams.

In our game, we wanted to show how actions have a greater effect than we realize. We tried to show this, through how the player collects gears throughout the game world. If they retrieve the gears in a destructive and quick way, the player will receive a bad ending. However, if the player retrieves the gears in a constructive and patient way, they have an opportunity to receive the good ending, although taking too much time will cause the player to lose the game.

Instructions:
Open the RenPy application inside the zip. It'll open up a pop-up window, in which case select "Feed the Machine" under "Projects."

If you want to get to actual gameplay, select "Yes" when the game asks you if you've played before.

This was my third Game Jam project that I worked on. The Theme was "together" and required participants to create a local multiplayer.

Our team decided to make a turn-based strategy game based on Chess. I was in charge of Character rendering, UI, and a minor role in programming. I learned a lot about how interactivity with UI worked, as well as gained a heightened respect for those behind programming UI's for video games.

Due to some issues with the lighting of the characters, as well as some issues with programming, we were not able to implement all the features we had planned for the UI design. But we were able to implement the core gameplay, as well as make it look nice enough to play.

Our team placed third for this Game Jam because we failed to discover a game-breaking bug that prevented the player from regaining stamina to fight, essentially ending the game for them when they ran out of strength. 

The original story idea was that two chess pieces wanted to make their own board game, so they had to fight all the other board games, take their abilities, and create the ultimate board game. This led to features like changing how the player moves and attacks based on the hat they were wearing. The hats were implemented in mechanics, but not actually rendered in the latest version.

Instructions:
After opening the project, go to the content browser. Inside the "Content" folder, select the "StartScreen" level and run the project.

Controls:
"A" toggles between attack and movement.
Right-click allows you to confirm the action, whether that be to attack or move.
"B" gives the current player the bishop moveset (from chess).  This costs 1 stamina.
"R" gives the current player the rook moveset.  This costs 1 stamina.
"N" gives the current player the knight moveset.  This costs 2 stamina.
"Q" gives the current player the queen moveset. This costs 1 stamina.
"P" gives the current player the pawn moveset. They don't use up any stamina when using this ability.
"K" gives the current player the king moveset. They don't use up any stamina when using this ability.
Spacebar ends the player's turn.

Since we didn't implement any bosses, the game is ultimately an endless battle against checker pieces, which gain more and more durability as the rounds go on.

The checker pieces start off with two health.

The GE_Projects file contains all of my assignments for my Unreal Engine Class, in which we more or less mess around in Unreal and build basic levels for homework. There are first-person and 3rd person levels, which should be set to the correct mode, although they may need a little toggling. You can look into the code and the like and mess around with it at your leisure, since there are a lot of different projects.

Controls:
They are the basic Unreal movement controls for the first person characters.
The third-person characters can pick up specific items by standing near an object and pressing "E."
The third-person characters can select and drop items by pressing "I" and then clicking on a specific item.
Some objects interact with the player in a certain way if the player walks near them.

This was my first project ever using a skeleton and joints. It gave me a good foundational understanding of how to use joints, although it used multiple different meshes without any skin deformation, looking more like a robot than an actual organic being. Although it looks pretty basic compared to what's normal to me now, it was a good stepping stone in moving towards technical art.

An attached File should be at the top of the page. The File name is "BasicCharacterSkeleton.mb".

This is my first and earnest attempt at fully rigging a game ready Character. I'm not completely down with it, as I have to finish getting all the control rigs set up, as well as getting all the IK and FK aspects dealt with, but I have learned so much through this attempt alone, especially with using the Maya node editor and the script editor. I did make a good amount of mistakes in how I first approached it, but I feel I am on the right track, and I'm beginning to understand the Character Rigging workflow.

I also rendered the character myself. It's very basic, I know, but I wanted something that would be easy to mess around with and very simple.

An attached File should be at the top of the page. The File name is "CharacterRigInProgress.mb".