Other Professional Projects

In 2011, Arkadium held an HTML5 "one-button games" programming challenge, where the game programmers were invited to create a small one-button HTML5 game during a few free hours. I created Jump Roper: Legend of the Galactic Rope with the help of Will Bredbeck, Senior Art Director at Arkadium.

• Play Jump Roper: Legend of the Galactic Rope here!

The client had a full 3D environment and was written in C# with the XNA Framework, and I added support for the Granny 3D animation library (along with custom shaders for the models) for an extremely advanced animation system. We used blend graphs, IK, and complex animation state trees to really give the main character realistic-looking and emotionally relevant behaviors and movement.

A major aspect of this game was its server component, which meant that the client was constantly communicating with a remote server to store information, receive challenges, and (eventually) communicate with other players. We implemented this as a Linux PHP server with a MySQL back-end, receiving simple HTTP web requests and responding with JSON-encoded data, depending on the request. This really channeled a lot of work I had done before I was in the game industry, when I worked on Linux and Solaris server software in C and PHP with various SQL databases behind the scenes.

I wish I could say more about about these, but alas, they are lost to the mists of time (and non-disclosure agreements).

My Fun Facts Coach began as "Bright Life," which might give you a better idea of its purpose. It was designed to teach the player all sorts of things to live a better life, in a variety of categories: Body, Social Life, Mind and Soul, Your World, and Modern Living. Each category is filled with hundreds of information sets, consisting of quizzes, detailed information, explanations, and final exams, which allow you to focus and learn things like how to conserve energy, what kinds of foods to eat, coping with bad emotions, preventing illness, and more.

This title was the largest test or our localization system ever, with over 100,000 words translated into French and Spanish, an order of magnitude more than any of our previous games. Surprisingly, this worked without a hitch, as the system was designed early on to handle a lot more text than we were giving it.

Imagine: Movie Star was another entry in the Powerhead music game stable. In this one, the rhythm gameplay took the context of the player being a movie star, going to premieres, fashion shows, high-profile dates, etc. During each level, cut-scene style stories would play in real time along with the music, interspersed with sections of music gameplay. The game also contained our most fully fleshed out clothing outfitter to date, letting the player choose their articles of clothing and re-texture them using a variety of methods, including colors, stripes, patterns, and even drawing their own outfits.

The most complex piece of development we did for this project was actually the in-level vignettes themselves. These were to be videos we'd play back along with the music, but because the player's character could be wearing virtually any outfit, we had to render the player character in 3D along with the video playback, in perfect synchronization. A placeholder character was animated in the video, but removed from the final render, with its animation going to the player model during the game—and the camera also animating. The final piece of the puzzle was using the depth buffer to allow parts of the scene to occlude the character, which allowed the character to blend in perfectly.

CSI: Dark Motives for the Nintendo DS was a port of the second CSI game originally released on PC, with a bunch of new features to take advantage of the Nintendo DS hardware, particularly the dual-screen graphics and Touch Screen controls. This was an extremely tight project, and we accomplished it in the time we had by using as much of the original game's data as possible, writing a native DS parser to handle the game's scripting and puzzles. The DS-enhanced controls included various kinds of tapping, prodding, holding, etc. to really give the user the feel of using the tools, and the dual screen support let you review the case on the top screen while performing the investigation on the bottom, which really streamlined the game and fit everything together.

Squeezing some of the elements of the PC game onto the DS was still challenging, however. We were able to add a 3D panoramic display for exploring crime scenes, but the game's characters needed to be reduced to still images rather than animated models. We only had a small amount of saved game storage, so we had to encode the original saved games into a series of numbers. Finally, due to the requirement to localize the game in four other languages, we removed the voice-over tracks from the in-game videos, replacing them with subtitles that could be translated.

Trollz: Hair Affair was a minigame collection with a really cool story component. The five Trollz girls—Amethyst, Ruby, Sapphire, Onyx, and Topaz—had to save the boys in their class from being sent to military school and having their hair cut off (!!!) by going back in time to stop the evil Simon from doing ... something evil. This was the first game to use Powerhead's ubiquitous Menu System, which was used in every single GBA and DS game since (and was ported to XNA for Glow Artisan for Windows Phone 7).

As Lead Programmer, I was responsible for overseeing the development of all the game's systems, as well as the individual minigames. In addition to working on the game's systems, I implemented one of the minigames myself, and led the other 3 programmers on the project to design, plan, and develop the other 4 minigames and some of the other systems.

This game was also the birth of Powerhead's powerful dialog system, which allowed for characters to have dialog in a story and continued to be used in multiple GBA and DS games. The story in this game was notable because it involved a Day of the Tentacle reference, which I am really proud of.

The Trollz girls are meeting with wise Obsidian, their mentor, after the evil Simon has stolen their magical powers:

This is topped only by the following line by Topaz, the ditz of the group:

And, scene.

Legends of Wrestling II for GBA managed to do something extremely difficult: cram a wrestling game with dozens of real-world wrestlers into a tiny GBA cart. We accomplished this by using Maya to prerender all of the possible moves for each of 4 body types: thin, medium, fat, and Andre the Giant. Each wrestler got a primary, secondary, and tertiary color; the bodies we rendered used red, green, and blue to signify these, and shades of gray for the skin color. We modified the palette for each wrestler to show the right outfit color and skin color, so we could get the full range of wrestler bodies with these limited assets.

As for the wrestler's face and head, we prerendered each wrestler's head from all possible angles—using the GBA's sprite rotation for one of the degrees of rotation—and stored the head's offset and rotation for each prerendered frame. By doing this, we could overlay a wrestler's head on top of the generic body that most closely matched their own body type (and due to the palette tricks, they would appear in the right colors).

It was a neat little system, when it worked. Unfortunately, there were rare occasions when a head would appear to be slightly detached from the body (rounding errors), as well as a general lack of game balance and fun-factor. Still, it was an interesting experiment.

This was Powerhead's reimagining of the console version of MK&A Sweet 16, which was sort of a Mario Party type of game. The GBA version was an isometric driving game, sort of like Crazy Taxi without the crazy. It was rounded out with some mini-games, which included 4-player link cable support.

My work on this title mainly consisted of a GBA library code, including a VRAM manager, DMA VBlank queueing system, MusyX sound library support, and similar.