Neopets
The past few years I’ve been working at neopets where I’ve been able to design and develop a variety of games. Some of the projects I’ve worked on are listed below. This doesn’t include various sponsored projects and site applications I’ve worked on.
- Biscuit Brigade: Hagan’s Last Stand is a tower defense game where towers change their weapons as they advance through the upgrade tree. I was given a good amount of time to test and adjust the balance on this. As a result, the different branches are pretty well balanced against each other, though you’re best off mixing types. An interesting note is the score affected by how little you spend, which let players to try to find the minimal builds needed to clear the game after they’ve beaten it the first time.
- Neopian Battlefield Legends is a more traditional tower defense game with a few cash shop towers and maps added. My work on this way focused on adjusting the difficulty levels and setting the purchased and free campaigns to have the same point yields.
- Mop ‘n’ Bop is a side scrolling action focused on charging and timing attacks to keep enemies from getting past you. It also features an upgrade system that unlocks new specialties as the character levels up.
- Eye of the Storm was my first project with the company. It’s a fairly straightforward search game with some hidden surprises.
- SMELT centers around quick, precise removal of stamped parts before time runs out.
- Shenkuu Warrior II is a vertically scrolling platformer where the player uses a swinging and jumping to reach the top of a mountain. This was a collaborative effort where I was working on the code that dynamically generates level layouts from config file specifications.
- Legends of Pinball is a classic pinball game.
- Dungeon Dash is a side scrolling platformer with dynamically generated level layouts.
PetPet Park
When this virtual world was still in development, I was called in to fix and rebuild the character animation system. I also did some later bug fix work on the site.
Mezzo
Mezzo is a table top roleplaying game currently in play test. You can find the page dedicated to the game here.
Other Projects
I’ve also worked a variety of projects before I began working as a designer professionally. The old links to this work seem to be down, but I should be able to pull up some of the files for these on request.
Generational Play
My capstone project at RIT focused on dynamically creating and evolving playable characters. The project started with a set of randomly generated characters. The player could then use that character to explore a virtual island and interact with similar creatures while hunting down food.
After exploring the world for a while, the character can spawn a batch of children. The player can switch to any of those children when they’re created. The parent can also collect genes from other creatures to affect the resulting children. This lets the player evolve toward the kind of character they want to play while opening up interesting combinations they might not have thought up on their own.
The player character also tracks the player’s behavior. When the player changes characters, the previous character uses that record to influence how it acts. By the same token, other children inherit preferences from their parent. In this way, the player can indirectly shape the behavior of an entire group of creatures.
Night of the Living Brick
“Night of the Living Brick” was a side scrolling shooter which faced the player against a variety of animated structures and terrain. My primary work on this project centered around weapon design and balancing.
Adaptive Interactive Fiction
One early project of was developing interactive fiction with self motivated NPCs. The center piece of this was a quest which would be competed by an NPC if the player did not finish it quickly enough.
Phonetic Encryption
Creating a new language is an interesting challenge, but building the dictionary can be time consuming. To handle this, I’ve built an encryption program where the output is built to always be pronouncable. The result is a program that can generate new words as the need arises.
