My Games

Project: Ziggurat

When given the option of doing any software project we wanted in my undergraduate Software Engineering class, the students in the class quickly formed three teams, each determined to make some form of game. My team's name was Team 77, and we made Project: Ziggurat, a Flash-based strategy game in which the player battles an AI opponent to build a tower 10 levels tall; each level has a special ability, one gives cannons to blast the enemy's tower to bits, while another sends soldiers to steal the enemy's gold. The entire game was coded in roughly one month, with my contributions consisting of the entire codebase (except for the initial AI code), some graphics, and all of the animations. Creating the sound effects for the game was particularly fun, as doing so ultimately boiled down to seven guys yelling and stomping at a small microphone. As part of our final project presentation, I also created a trailer for the game (you'll need DivX to play it). You can find links to both the trailer and the game below; I composed the music for the trailer as well.

Dot Master

As part of the Decision-Making in AI class that I took in the Fall of 2005, I designed and implemented a game to serve as a testbed for an idea I had for doing player modelling. The game is called Dot Master, and it's a fairly simple puzzle game in which the player repeatedly chooses one of nine actions to bring a 3 by 3 grid of dots and spaces into a given configuration. Some actions let you bring dots to life, other actions let you shuffle them around, and others let you kill them off. You can find a links below to both the game and the Player Modelling paper I wrote below; the game requires Flash Player 8 or newer, and the paper was published at AIIDE'06.

Gave

In the summer after completing my undergrad, I had the ambition to round up a team and create some software. Specifically, six friends and I got together and hammered out the beginnings of Gave, a generic game engine designed to support large online communities. In addition to being the project manager, I led the client-development team, producing all of the C++ codebase aside from Networking and Sound. I learned and used OGRE 3D, an open-source 3D rendering toolkit for the game's graphics. We designed Gave from the get-go to be an entirely open-source effort, with all code being released under an MIT License; you can find code and various snippets of documentation via a link below. Although the current incarnation of Gave allows for little more than a "chase your friends' robots using your robot over the internet" game, some of my team still has interest in getting work going again, once I'm a little less busy with being a grad student.