Here is a collection of projects and curiosities i've experimented with over the years. Looking at it, you'd wonder why I entered the web industry, but these are side projects, and they give a nice variety over doing web projects on the side.
My "day job" has always been in web development, whereas I would spend my own time usually working on different graphics or game projects. Naturally, client work has to come first, so most these projects are incomplete or proof of concepts. I did intend to release "Invasion Legacy" and Lunar though, even if they would turn out to be financially unviable.
This does not include commercial projects or client work. I still have the source code of all these projects, but due to their age, some will not compile. If there's any interest in them, then I may open source some of them, though be aware some will be an example of how NOT to code.
There's plenty of tower defence games out there, but none where you play as the actual runners.
This started to become quite a story-based game with objectives and goals. ARkit was announced around this time, and a couple evenings later, the game world was spread along the living room floor.
This was put on hold (indefinitely) due to time constraints, yet again.
By this point, I had been in the web industry for three years and always had a graphics itch to scratch. The idea was to get the terrain code ported to Objective-C and see it running on OS X. It went better than expected.
OpenGL was much nicer to use on Mac OS X, and it only took a weekend and a few evenings to re-develop the random terrain generator, and add framebuffer objects, shaders, and a few other niceties.
What happens when smart phones are all the rage, and apps are popping onto the app store 10 and penny? Bandwagon time..
This was effectively going to be a remake of War of the Worlds (PC RTS game) but on iOS. It was certainly "getting there", but then freelance projects demanded all my time and this got sidelined.
A map editor for a Knightlore style game. Inspired loosely by Valve Hammer Editor, progress was going well and we started to have a functioning game world (as opposed to a 3D scene with somewhat related models).
Not much remains of this project, but it certainly scratched an itch. This is raycasting as basic as it comes - not nearly Doom or Duke3D, but remeniscent of those ancient maze like games you'd get in a computer magazine CD back in the 90's.
University was fast coming to a close, so the idea was to find quicker ways to make money from games (as opposed to not at all). There were a lot of persuasive articles about XNA back then, and for good reason.
Compared to C++ and OpenGL (on Windows XP), XNA was absolutely fantastic to work with. It was very opinionated which avoided any "should I use x or y method to approach this?" and development was much faster as a result. A few rough battlescars from OpenGL certainly accelerated that however.
Back during the university days, I got hooked on graphics engine programming. My dissertation ended up being on Procedural Terrain Generation.
The idea for a few of us was to build games which we wanted to see resurrected, or to turn existing games into something else. Ideas included:
We worked insane hours on our own individual versions of the engine and trying to work out how to do certain concepts, but ultimately the university workload got in the way.
Below are the the various concepts done on my version, and anything perhaps interesting about them. The engine was originally written on Windows XP with OpenGL, but fragments were later ported to XNA (for Xbox 360) and much later on, I ported some of the terrain code to MacOS.
I'll be first to admit - "New Reality" is a rather... early statement to be making for this, and "engine" is being optimistic..
This reads the raw data of a Quake BSP map file, and renders its geometry.
This was a method of figuring out why things were done the way they are and was certainly a learning exercise.
Black0ps was a small online community of developers and gamers. Forums were "the thing" back then, but we had a different approach where we would manually promote members up the ranks, and this turned out to build a very tight-knit community.
Many of the members have met each other in person, often across continents, and remain good friends to this day.
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