"The British Are Coming!" is a Unity game made for the 50th Ludum Dare game jam. The theme was "Delay the Inevitable," and after some brainstorming, our team quickly settled on the idea of a pirate ship trying to maintain its operations in a world where the British Empire was slowly taking over the seas.

In the game, you set sail and recruit pirates to pillage and raid locations of your choice. Each location has procedural points of interest with variable difficulties and rewards. For each successful raid, you will gain ire from the British Navy and find future destinations better guarded. It starts off with small camps and ramps up to keeps, towns, and even forts.

As the sole programmer on this project, I dove into creating my first 3D game. Our vision was ambitious, and I am still proud of the amount of features we managed to cram into this project in just 72 hours, including:

• Smart pathing to allow for navigation of hundreds of agents around dynamic objects.
• Procedural islands generated on several data points from your current playthrough.
  • For instance, raiding more British-controlled territories would increase the likelihood of military presence on future islands.
• A fully-featured tutorial to help players learn the game.
• A full menu system with UI options.
• Secrets, easter eggs, and side missions.

I cannot take credit for the incredible soundtrack, which, despite hearing it for literally tens of hours during development, I have not gotten bored with! Matt absolutely smashed it out of the park with this one.

"PIBE" is a game made in Unity for the 48th Ludum Dare game jam. The theme was "Deeper and Deeper," and I collaborated with my wonderful partner (now wife). After some initial challenges, we resonated with the idea of a diver exploring for treasure and using it to upgrade their equipment to dive deeper and deeper.

I was responsible for the code and level design. What I learned from this project includes:

• The ease of designing a large map on paper compared to implementing it in code, and the value of iterative refinement.
• The power of parallax in adding polish and depth to a scene, making a world come alive.
• Creating dynamic terrain with sprite shapes along a spline.
• The significant impact of small polish elements, like the music transitioning from land to underwater with a breath sound effect.

Although we entered purely for fun I am proud of the scores we achieved with the most prestigious being voted #32 out of 3866 entries in "theme" and #239 overall!

I am also so blown away by Ami's ability to rise up to a challenge in an area she had no experience in and create such beautiful art assets in such a short time frame. Without her help this project would not have been possible.

"Sushi INK" was a game developed in Unity for the 47th Ludum Dare game jam. The theme was "Stuck in a Loop," and I worked as the sole developer in a team of friends.

We aimed to deviate from traditional interpretations of the theme. The concept of being stuck on a sushi conveyor belt emerged and resonated with us all. This evolved into controlling an octopus making sushi with its tentacles, leading to the unique idea of a "sushi and tentacle management game."

In "Sushi INK," you control one tentacle at a time to pick, place, chop, and cook ingredients, fulfilling customer orders. The game's simplicity belies the challenge of limited reach and counter space, leading to juggling orders and tentacle tangles.

The technical heart of the project lay in tentacle movement and control, alongside creating a convincing conveyor belt. Tentacles were implemented using connected rigid bodies and joints, complemented by a line renderer for a realistic effect. Additionally, I created a tool for building conveyor belts from splines and prefabs, allowing quick visualization and generation.

I'm proud of the outcome of this game. The team's collective effort added substantial polish and finishing touches, including dynamic screen transitions, an animated score screen, and a gameplay-mechanics-driven main menu.

Matt also went above beyond by not just creating one absolute banger for a soundtrack, but an entire OST of 5 unique and varied tracks.