'A silent betrayal' is a Unity game made in a week for the 1-Button Jam 2024.

This jam, as the name suggests, had the restriction that the game could only use one button. This naturally lead itself to the idea of using a telegram and morse code as an input method. With this in mind we decided to stretch ourselves outside of our comfort zone and create a game that was more narrative driven than our previous games.

At its basics 'A silent betrayal' is a branching visual novel game wrapped in a morse-code mini-game. Each message must be decoded and a decision on how to react be made and sent back via a series of dots and dashes. However, each choice has a meaningful impact on the story and how the war plays out, with a branching and looping event line that leads to different outcomes. This multilayered narrative creates a sense of unease and tension as you try to navigate the game and discover where your loyalties lie.

Im most proud of the branching event system created in the game. Each scenario has many branching paths that can loop back or lead to completely new outcomes. These events can have triggers associated with them like planes flying by or artillery firing. The choices made also lead into the dynamic battle noises in the background.

The morse code system itself was a challenge to try and make a caricature of morse code that felt good but also scaled well with a system that can generate it dynamically at runtime.

There is a tutorial in the game which always feels like an achievement to get in a game jam game!

Post Zero is a Unity game made in a week for the Crazy Web Game Jam 2024.

With the jams theme of 'Everything is a remix' I decided to create a game where (almost) everything could be destroyed and those components could be used to create new things. I thought this mechanic worked well with a post apocalyptic zombie survival setting.

In order to facilitate this I create several interconnected systems to allow me to quickly implement new items and interactions, these included:

• A damage system with damage types and modifiers (e.g. fire, piercing)
• A 'Shootable' system powering everything from the players weapons, mines or turrets
• A 'Destructibles' system with loottables and pickups used for the environment and enemies
• A 'Crafting' system working with the loottables to allow the player to create new items from the destroyed components

There is also an inverse kinematics system that keeps the players hands in the correct position even when changing weapons and performing differnt animations.

Overall I feel like the game has a good atmosphere and deep mechanics. However, these arent fully realised due to the time constraints of the jam.

"I may be a surgeon but I am on my lunch break and I don’t think I should operate on that family" was made in unity for the 3rd Indie Dev Game Jam. The theme was "one tool, many uses" and out team quickly settled on the humble spork as the ultimate realisation of this.

In the game you are presented with comedic illness that you must scoop, slice and prong out of the patient, using each mouse button for each action. I was responsible for all the code in the game, managing to squeeze the long laundry list of overly optimistic features into the 72 hours we had to make the game. This included:

• Two modes of play, a career mode and arcade mode.
• An Online high score system for each mode.
• 14 different illnesses to cure.
• Tutorials, transitions and options.
• An animated credits scene.

"Nano Evolution Bots (N.E.B)" is a Unity game I made in 72 hours for the 24th Score Space Jam. Given the theme "Evolution," I decided to create a game where you try to selectively evolve nanobots to counter a constantly adapting virus.

To play, you must mix physics-based, springy molecule chains to update your nanobots, maintaining a balance between positive effects and unwanted mutations.

Some highlights I took away from this project:

• As this project was a solo endeavor, I had to create the graphics myself. Wanting to be efficient with my time, but also to push myself to experiment in areas I was less comfortable with, I dedicated time to exploring new techniques for the background graphics while using a more familiar style for the foreground elements. I'm happy with the results, which strike a good balance between time and effort, and allow players to easily distinguish between foreground and background elements.
• Using physics as a key element of the game required players to untangle webs of molecules. This led to some interesting and fun gameplay elements and taught me a lot about physics engine edge cases and designing around known limitations.
• I enjoyed creating the molecule name generator that builds a unique name depending on composition, yielding some pleasing and amusing results.

"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.

Anibubbles was a physics-based connect game. The objective was to connect animals of the same type in the longest possible string, with bigger combos awarding more points. The twist was that the animals were dynamic, physics-based objects that would bounce and move as more were added.

I developed this game to learn about deploying Unity to various platforms, particularly Android. What I learned was that deploying to Android can be challenging. The combination of differing Unity versions and the fragmented Android ecosystem meant that building an APK took longer than developing the game itself!

This experience taught me valuable lessons about the complexities of building for different platforms and the importance of understanding the deployment process beforehand.

"Slasher" was a game made with a friend for a self-hosted Halloween game jam. With our only limitation being to make it Halloween appropriate we quickly took inspiration from classic horror movies to make a 'slasher' game that we cleverly named "Slasher".

In this game you must pick off the holiday goers one by one without being seen. You can hide in the shadows and use the environment to your advantage.

The game included several things that were new to me at the time:

• Tilemap based level design
• Building a generic interaction system as a unity tool
• Dynamic 2d lighting
• A homemade ray-casting AI system for navigation and player detection
• Dynamic music that changes based on your actions and location

One of the biggest things we both learnt from this project was how to deal with scope creep. We had a whole slew of features and mechanics that we quickly realised needed to be cut in order to get the game finished in time. Although looking back at it, I am taken aback at just how much we managed to achieve in such a short time frame.

The music still creeps me out a little bit....

I'm falling was a simple arcade game for the Windows phone. despite its simple premise it utilised a lot of the phones features, like the accelerometer for movement and an online high score.

I'm falling was my most successful mobile game being featured in the app store in several countries.

Pop was my first foray into making a paid app. It was a simple arcade game for Windows phone but offered lots of different game modes and unlockables.

Designing a paid game presented a lot of unique challenges like maintaining two builds (one free and one paid) and making sure the free version was still fun to play. It also brought a lot of unique marketing challenges, especially on a (then fledgling) store like the Windows phone store.

Escape from bacon bay prison was my first ever entry into a game jam. It was for the Bacon game jam whose theme was "lights". Working in a pair with an artist names Josh, we decided that we wanted to make something with a unique interpretation of the theme as we were sure most entries would interpret it as light and shadow.

We chose "Lights out", the phrase used in media and popular culture for when they would switch all the lights out for the night in a prison. This manifested as a psuedo memory/action game where you spent the day period planning your escape and then the lights out period executing your plan and avoiding the guards.

Reaction chains was my first commercially successful Windows phone game. It was an arcade game where you had a certain amount of chances to tap the screen to cause a chain reaction of explosions. The more explosions you caused the more points you got.

The game had a lot of replayability and was featured on a few Windows Phone app stores. Seeing user engagement was inspiring, and it felt like persistence in learning and honing my skills from previous projects was paying off.

Having gotten to grips with the tooling for Windows phone development I wanted to challenge myself to make something with what I'd learnt withing a constrained time frame. I decided to make a version of higher or lower as the game mechanics were simple and I could focus on the tooling and polish.

Having just watched "juice it or lose it" I was keen to spend as much time learning how to give the project the best game feel I could. This also helped me stretch my new-found skills in different ways by having to shift my perspective to see how they could be applied.

Reaction thumbs was my first ever published project. Players were tasked with tapping lights as they appeared on screen before they turned off and seeing how long they could maintain it.

Although the game had a simple and weirdly addicting charm, the goal wasn't to make the best game but to learn how to finish a project and deal with all the admin surrounding launching a product.

I still remember my nerves as I submitted the game to the store and the rush of excitement when I saw over 100 people had downloaded my little demo game. No matter what the reviews, plays or views on anything subsequent, nothing will mean as much as those 100 people did to me back then.