In 2022 I started doing a Game Design course with my Wife, Jen. Before starting this I have spent the last 20 years working as a Land Surveyor, starting straight out of High School. I was starting to get a little 'long in the tooth' so decided it was time to make the leap and get a degree in something. So I chose something I felt excited about, and what could be more exciting than GAMES!
For work I do during my course, I'll provide links to the pages here. I'll actually provide a link button to the whole Learning Journal just below this box. Each of the Projects will have a link to an Itch.io page or similar if they are available as a game. Please feel free to download them and test them out.
If you would like to contact me you can do so by sending an email to: draftingalburywodonga [at] gmail.com
As part of my course I have created this:
But just be aware. This is literally the first thing I have ever made(1). I had great fun making this, though it stressed me out so much. It was a Project I am getting marked on(2) and I really pushed the time limit on it, because I kept changing it.
This project was the first major team project we did. The idea was to make a bunch of mirco-games and combine them into a single game like Warioware. This turned out fairly good actually. There's a few minor issues with it, but generally it is a fully playable game that we made together. I took a lead role here and tried to help the other students to make sure we all managed to get a reasonable number of games completed to make it fairly interesting. We didn't get enough time to test and balance it out though, which would have been a good thing to do for this. One of the levels is pretty much impossible.
In Trimester 3 of my course I made this:
This is the 2nd Iteration of the Prototype that was made for the prototypes part of Studio 2. The first version was made by myself, under the requirements that were given. It needed to be a a Quest / Adventure, interact with an NPC, some sort of inventory and collecting of items. As well as using some of the prompts provided, of which I used Greyscale, Dark, and Crow.
For the Prototype Brief in Trimester 3 I made this Sokoban puzzle. The requirements for this prototype was for it to be a Sokoban (hence why it is clearly that) and to be only 5 levels long. That was a pretty simple stipulation. I had fun with this. For the prompts I used CMY (and made all my own assets), Underground and Hot.
As a group project for Trimester 3 we did a VR Project.
I was joint Programming Lead - with a focus on looking after the Git and also working on our VR Origin point and teleport function. I also worked on the Escape Room style level we did, called the Server Room. This ended up being pretty decent actually. You can find some of my logs here.
In my 4th Trimester, start of 2023, we began with an Art Jam.
The idea here was to take something we loved that would be considered art and try to get the same feeling from our game. While I failed at that a bit I was happy with my end result, and made a little game. There's a couple of bugs in it, but it was made over 2 weeks, so fixing those bugs was not a priority.
Also in my 4th Trimester, we did Meaningful Games.
This is the creation I have made that I am most proud of. The link below will go to the Project page where you can find pretty much everything that was involved with this game. I had some help from art, design and animation students for the characters, some backgrounds, and the UI. The story is influenced by events that my wife has gone through, as a person who has DID. This came together well, and generally works, though I think there are still some bugs with it. I used Fungus for the first time, and it was great. One of my friends actually managed to trigger all 5 endings that are possible.
For the 5th Trimester we did "Games to make money"
I mean, not exactly, but that was the basis around some of what we were learning. Ethics, branding, different models for making money from a game, that kind of thing. As a group we chose a Gacha Game, and I think we made something ok. I'm not completely happy with the final product, as we could have done a better job than this, but I was out of action in the final week with my youngest son in hospital. This did cause any number of problems. Links below to some of our documentation. Though the branding document was a bit of a joke.