Projects Expanded

8bitBlitz

Fast paced action parkour platformer with a heavy focus on grappling and momentum. Race against the clock to string together wall runs, double jumps, dashes, and most importantly grappling, in this arcade inspired speed running game.

Developed in just over three months by Noah Rogers, Myron Massey, and myself. Noah and I spent the first month prototyping the core gameplay mechanics while Myron focused on the UI and some early level blockouts. Month two we polished the movement and hunted down the evil bug (it was a for loop gone bad) and created our enemy AI: Kevin the bad guy. Month three we focused on art and player feedback.
This project was a ton of fun to create and even more fun to play!

This project was my first major leap into blueprint scripting. I learned a lot in the three months it took to build it, and one of these days I’ll get around to redoing the parkour system in GAS and we’ll publish the game on steam, for now here’s a link to the Itch page: https://sapphiredagger.itch.io/8-bit-blitz

Projects at Full Sail

WaterMan

WaterMan is a third person puzzle platformer made in honor of the firefighters in California. You play as WaterMan, a sentient puddle creature who’s fighting the wildfires around his pond. In this project I spent ~15h designing and implementing the player’s ability to shoot water, and the jump ability that follows the trajectory of the water spray. I also modified the fire propagation system we were using to allow it to be put out, and to reignite, as well as setting it up to spread across a larger area.

BloodMoon Dragon Castle

This clip is tough to watch, no commenting on some super ugly blueprint scripting, BUT, everyone starts somewhere and I’ve improved leagues since this point. For this project I found a tutorial on youtube titled ‘Titanfall 2 parkour in ue5’ and got to work tweaking values and playing with nodes to find something that felt fun. I spent a couple weeks playing with this before I built a blockmesh level to showcase it in (video on the main page). This project is what led to the idea for 8bitBlitz!

Other Works

Adventure Project was a fun time level designing a split world mechanic where the player could interact with ‘pocket wormholes’ to switch between before and after versions of a secret laboratory housing dark matter research that exploded. I had two sets of assets that I tagged ‘before’ and ‘after’ that would trade places when activated giving the illusion that the player had transported through time. This mechanic allowed me to create environmental puzzles and story telling that the player could follow and solve to lead them to the roof of the building to escape in a helicopter.

Tournamental was an isometric puzzle game that I was given the opportunity to add to. I created a new tile type called an Ice Slide inspired by the ice caves in Pokémon games on the Gameboy. My Ice Slides would push the player to the next tile in sequence, but if that next tile was a wall, they’d get a stack of ‘cold’ that at three stacks would freeze the player, restarting the level. stepping on any other tile would remove the cold stacks. This project was very fun, and pretty nostalgic with the nod to the old Pokémon games.

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Mars Games – Unannounced Project

Since Oct of 2024 I’ve been interning with Mars Games, working on a super exciting project that I can’t say much about, or show much of due to NDA. What I can say is that I’ve helped to design and implement several core gameplay features including player progression systems, smart enemy AI, PCG, and skill trees. Since joining as a Systems Designer I’ve been promoted twice, first to Lead of systems design, and more recently to Senior Producer. I’ve led the systems design team through several workshop style learning opportunities to progress our skills as a department, and using that knowledge to integrate and iterate on the core systems of the game. The current position of Senior Producer has allowed me to really hone my ability to work with disciplines outside of design and understand what each discipline’s needs and capabilities are, I think this has made me a more effective designer, and further honed my leadership skills. Come see us at GDC to get a peek at the current state of the game!