Please revisit this page for more examples of my academic and personal work in the future!
Writing
Listed here are some of my media assessments, design documents, and other pieces written at Full Sail University:
Quintessence Code Document - A 22-page report of some of the things I wrote for Quintessence’s gameplay.
Shadowcurse Design Document - My first design document was created with four of my colleagues in a one-month frame. I wrote the “Dagoz Temple” level design, “Victor Waldgrave” character design, and helped write the gameplay section. I was the primary editor and lead for the full document.
“…Net Neutrality” – A written assessment of research and debate on Net Neutrality.
Bloom Game Manual Draft - Our original draft of the game manual for our board game. This had much more information, but was condensed into the final draft, below.
Bloom Game Manual – This draft was designed to fold in the middle in order to print on both sides of a single page.
“In the High-G Seat” - A game review written about the arcade game ‘F-Zero AX.’
Programming
At the top of the page, you can see a little snippet of my OpenGL project, done in August 2008. I wanted to make a 3D rendition of Earthbound, and I think it came out pretty well! The scene depicts one of the final areas in the game where you control some robots. 
There were a few hiccups, like getting the right pictures for the cube-mapped sphere in the background, but I’ll be sure to fix them once our big project is finished and post a .exe for the project.
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Quintessence is a puzzle platformer created by a 15-person team in a span of five months. It started as a small idea reminiscent of Kid Chameleon‘s form-changing abilities, but turned into much more when this many minds came together. It turned out to be fantastic!
Here’s a small intro video created by our student producer, Nicholas Lance. You can also see more on www.quintessencegame.com and download the game.
Throughout my blogs, one can see a good chunk of the development process and a few of the challenges we faced. There are always plenty of war stories to be had in game development!
Be sure to check out these links for lots of information about the lifeline of Quintessence, start to finish:
- Version 1.0
- Feature Fragment Milestone
- Release Build v 1.0
- Alpha Build
- Alpha Presentations
- Beta Is Ready
- Final Presentations (Facebook)
More screenshots and fun stuff to come!
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My second major project, Bloom, was also a Japanese-themed game. This game was made on a four-man team in a two-month frame with a professor acting as our producer. As the team project lead, I wrote all of the documentation and made sure that I wrote a detailed report to our producer every other day after class. Most of our assets were made within the team itself, but some were professionally made by Full Sail (such as the tiles, intro screen, and logo).
The intro screen to Bloom, with some cool falling leaf particles we designed. We decided to make the game look cel-shaded to simplify our appearance and asset pipeline.
Bloom is a tile-based golf-like casual game with a target demographic of “35-60 year old females.” The idea was to incorporate Asian mythology into the game via the breath of Amaterasu. The goal of the game was to blow small lotus seeds into a pool of water in order to bring life back to the heavenly garden. The player controls the goddess’s breath with a four-tiered color bar that extends from the seed on mouse-click.
The "sandbox mode" gives a good example of the tile-based gameplay. Depending on the length of the colored bar when the mouse click is released, the seed will be moved at a faster rate for a longer time. At the top right, the flowers represent "move mode."
In most levels, rock tiles can be placed throughout the level in legal spaces in order to bounce the seed off them. This “inventory” of rock tiles was designed from the very beginning, as seen here:
Whiteboards are awesome for paper prototypes! This got the idea across to our producer in under thirty seconds with just a few pieces of paper and a breeze.
Other non-playable tiles included grass, sand, jade, wooden fences, wind, void, and water.
- Grass can be rolled over normally. Sand slows down the seed, and jade is slippery.
- Wind tiles give a small speed boost.
- Rocks and fences bounce the seed based on trajectory and whether or not Amaterasu’s breath is still blowing.
- Void tiles destroy the seed and place it back at the starting point.
- Water is the goal. Touching the seed to any water tile wins the stage.
Later on, this tile-based idea would be incorporated into the board game version, which was a smash hit in another class that ran alongside this game’s development cycle. We were very busy for those two months!
Some levels, such as the challenge levels, require the use of no tiles, or impose some other limitation. These include time limits, wind tile limits, bounce limits, or illusory pieces (rocks that act like grass tiles, for instance).
Some challenge levels have pretty tricky time limits. Here you can see an example of each tile type, our dialogue box, animated trees, and a full rock inventory. At the top right, the shovel represents "tile place" mode.
I personally designed 25 story levels and 16 challenge levels. The story levels all fit together to make one encompassed garden (like a miniature golf course).
The self-scrolling level select screen, thanks to Jonathan Lerner.
Challenge levels, once completed, granted small trophies that could be seen on their own screen.
In retrospect, doing this in XML (like the animations) would have been much easier!
Making all of these gameplay elements could not be done without our tools made in C#. Our team created a bitmap font editor with kerning; an extensive level editor; a particle editor that worked wonderfully with our engine; and an animation editor for the trees, player wind, and seed.
AEdit was an animation editor I made with MFC. The bottom parts control the animation and frames, and the top part controls cutting up the sprite sheet into parts of each frame.
Bloom will be put up for download soon. There are still a few things I’d like to iron out with it.
The level completion screen. Even has rolling numbers for tallying!
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Here is my first serious solo project, Katzenjammer. This was designed and coded within one month. Once Final Project is over, I plan on returning to this project and adding in the other designed material I had originally made for this project beyond the one month scope.
Fully upgraded weaponry for Spitfire, complete with side guns and missile batteries. Background art thanks to Kt Rosario.
This is a 2D top-down shooter with a number of different enemies, several enumerated attack types, and a boss at the end. Special thanks go to my old friends and several colleagues for their help on the project.
The first boss in its bullet curtain battle stage.
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Please contact me if you would like an installer for this game at alaclancegane@gmail.com.
My other game examples will be added to this site soon.
“rel=”me”
