Game Development

Major Game Projects

Rubble - Destructible Environment Puzzle Platformer

A Portal-inspired, first person shooter that focuses on destruction to dig tunnels and create debris to solve physics and platforming challenges across 50 levels.

Raid Party - Single-Player "Raiding" Experience

A real-time (with pause) strategy game where you control a team of MMORPG heroes attempting to defeat raid bosses, with a heavy focus on coordination and raid-style boss fight mechanics.

Baldur's Gate 3 Class Mod - Lee Sin, The Blind Monk

https://mod.io/g/baldursgate3/m/lee-sin-class-league-of-legends-tribute

Ability Recreation

In League of Legends, Lee Sin functions in real time, so converting all his abilities to function in Baldur's Gate 3 required some adjustments. With some scripting work, I believe I've recreated something that keeps the feel of Lee Sin's original design, from his "Insec" combos to his Flurry Passive for energy generation.

Passives

Over the course of this project, I had to reverse engineer the scripting of many existing BG3 abilities and passives in order to build up appropriate Lee Sin replica abilities. Doing this taught me a lot about Larian's scripting commands and I'm eager to learn even more as I continue to experiment with future mods.

Progressions

In building Lee Sin's level progressions, I tried to make sure the player would feel like they were getting new things every level or two, even if those things were just notifications about their abilities increasing in power with level scaling. Lee Sin's progressions go until level 30 in case players increase the level cap.

LevelMap Scaling

Before working on this mod, I wasn't aware that BG3 passives and abilities were often populated with level-scaling charts like this. I found this to be an invaluable tool in ensuring that abilities (and their tooltips) could be kept relevant all through the game. This also served as an excellent way to organize and rebalance the power of all Lee Sin's effects in one place.

New Choices

While Lee Sin's abilities in League of Legends are linked, (Sonic Wave and Resonating Strike are both on Q) I felt that, in a turn-based system, with more UI and pacing freedom, it made sense to give the player access to use each ability independently. In this mod, players pick basic abilities two by two each level until finally unlocking their Ultimate later on.

More to Learn

While I managed to recreate even esoteric Lee Sin mechanics like the "% bonus damage scaling with target missing health" on Resonating strike, or the "damage on collision" effect of Dragon's Rage, I still feel like there's lots of scripting tricks I've yet to learn. I'm confident that on future projects I will be able to continue to grow and create even more complex character systems.

Baldur's Gate 3 Class Mod - Viego, The Ruined King

https://mod.io/g/baldursgate3/m/viego-the-ruined-king-league-of-legends-tribute

Ambitious Passive

In League of Legends, Viego's passive allows him to possess a copy of Any defeated champion for a short time. Converting this to function in Baldur's Gate 3 required even more work and custom scripting than Lee Sin despite fewer abilities. As with his League of Legends iteration, an ability this complex has led to a lot of edge-cases and bugs to solve!

Osiris Scripting

To recreate Viego's full functionality, I needed to teach myself Larian's Osiris scripting language to access more powerful commands and systems than the default spell and passive editing system could provide. Learning through reverse engineering and sparse guides has been a challenge, but I've enjoyed the challenge and leveraged by coding background to figure things out!

Not Just a Passive

Not only does Osiris help with modifying and adding full characters to the party (and deleting them) but I also used it to create other elements of the kit. Viego's Ultimate, for example, causes enemies to take a % of their missing health as damage, which I recreated by learning to use the various variable and math systems in Osiris and setting up scripts to trigger on Heartbreaker's usage.

Portfolio Prototypes

"Just Click The Health Bars" - MMORPG Simulation Game

Inspired by MMORPG dungeons and raids where you often end up tunnel-visioning on health bars instead of the game's visuals (especially as a healer), this UI-only single player prototype lets you pick your party of tanks, dps, and healers, and take on unique boss fights.

Your character can be a combination of roles, picking abilities that heal, deal damage, buff, debuff, generate threat and more as you lead your party to victory. Enemy targets and Boss ability cooldowns are always shown on screen, with the ability to mouse over any ability, buff, debuff or cooldown for tooltip explanations. To create additional engagement, whenever the party kills an enemy, coins drop for a limited time for the player to mouse-over collect for future rewards!

"Real-time Roguelike Deckbuilder" - Removing turns from Deckbuilders

A deckbuilding experiment where everything happens in real time. Players can still pause to consider their choices, but must unpause to play cards. Energy regenerates at a set rate (which can be improved with some items/relics), enemies attack on a timer, but telegraph their actions above their heads while winding up.

To ensure players aren't starved for draws in a real-time system, players are given a free draw every 5 seconds, or can spend 1 energy to immediately draw more cards and play faster.

The real time nature allows for new mechanics like consistent over-time effects for damage or healing, as well as making "Stun" effects less game-warping than they are in turn-based systems.

Pathfinder Character Creator:

Inspired by the CRPGs of the past such as Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights that took the complexity of D&D character creation and condensed it down to a guided user experience, this project brought similar systems to building a Pathfinder character. The tool includes every base Pathfinder class and archetype (Fighter has over 40!) along with a working point-buy stat system and character sheet generator.

Student Work - Ruckus Games

While going through my post graduate degree at George Brown College in Toronto, Ontario, I work in a simulated game dev studio creating weekly prototypes and improving approved prototypes for exhibition in major game design competitions such as LevelUp Toronto.

During my time at our student studio "Ruckus Games" I worked in both team-based and direction-based roles as well as solo development of smaller game prototypes of my own. It is here that I first started work on Rubble as the capstone 'thesis game' of my degree.

Some prototypes included:

A co-op text adventure / VR game in which two players work together with very different experiences and information available as they attempt to lead each other through a puzzle and trap-filled dungeon with hints and opportunities to betray one another for personal gain. (Note: this was created long before "We were here" and just months before "Keep talking and no one explodes")
An educational game called "How to Operant Condition your Dragon" which teaches players about the varying forms, styles, and methods of operant conditioning by putting them in control of a dragon flying into battle. The player must praise, reward, punish, and influence the dragon in varying ways to change the likelihood of certain attacks or behaviours in order to make the most effective creature. Afterwards the player is told what methods they relied on most and given a score based on battle effectiveness.
A puzzle game starring two sentient magnets which worked together to attract and repel objects in order to progress through puzzles blocking the other's path.
A multiplayer first-person-shooter / platforming game in which players were able to swap places with whoever they could hit with their translocation rifles as all players scrambled to climb a central tower.

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