Portfolio

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

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Monday, July 31, 2006

In the wake of excitement among the Unity community after the announcement of popular video game portal, I created a prototype of a working "portal gun". In Portal, the player is given a device with which they can position two portals on certain walls and other surfaces. When both are put in place, the form a sort of inter-dimensional gate through which the player and other objects can pass. For example, the player might shoot a hole in the wall, and then the ceiling, and then walk through the wall, falling out the ceiling immediately afterward. I mimicked this behavior in a small demo as an experiment. When I gave out the source code others in the community tried to make it into a community project, however, that did not succeed.

Image from wired.com

Thursday, March 2, 2006

I release another work in progress learning project. (no executable available)


Unity forum thread

Tuesday, January 31, 2006


About 4 months after starting with Unity I release my current learning project to the public for the first time. An executable is available, but only for Mac, and is probably crash prone.

Unity forum thread

Saturday, October 1, 2005

I began learning Unity. I was sort of faced with a huge obstacle: I had never really programmed before besides the severely limited visual scripting from my old RPG engine. Also, 3D applications were completely new to me. Together this made it a bit like trying to build something in pitch black darkness. I knew I had to push forward though, even if I didn't understand it all until quite later. Due to this a cycle of learning sort of evolved that I still sometimes use to this day. Looking back I think I can say that this is how I learn:


  1. Examine a problem.
  2. Use my best guesses of what is relevant to try to look up information on the subject.
  3.  Make guesses about how to apply what I information I have.
  4.  Try a solution.
  5.  Try to make sense of how the solution failed, and make guesses about other methods that might work, taking into account everything I know so far.
  6.  Inquire with a relevant community about the problem.
  7. Go back to step 2.

Thursday, January 1, 2004

Before I really got into programming starting when I was very young and would sometimes draw mazes and then run around pestering people with them, trying to get people to figure them out. I had an interest in games or at least creating entertainment for others.


When I first really used how to use a computer I drew some simple maze games in photoshop and put them together in hyper card. This image is a reconstruction of my memory of what the first thing I did looked like.

When I was older my parents bought me this awful 2D Role Playing Game engine that I fairly quickly picked up on. It was unsupported and very rudimentary, it was sort of dropped in the middle of its development. For a long time I struggled with it and eventually got halfway through a few simple games like super simple hand drawn style rpgs, a top down tank shooter, and eventually an rpg with actual pixel art graphics that never got anywhere. Because I was around 13 at the time and just learning, compounded with the horribleness of the software I was using, these games never got anywhere and didn't make much sense.

Sadly I've lost all the data from these old projects so I will attach a screenshot of Secret of Mana 3, which was the inspiration for my pixel art game. I actually got some tilesets and levels done that looked similar, but obviously not as good.

Near the end of this stage I was modifying some existing games made with the Torque engine like Think Tanks, and I created a tic-tac-toe variant puzzle game with the RPG engine I was using, which was really pushing beyond it's limits. I was past ready to move on because the tool I had was limiting me, but I never found anything that didn't require a quantum leap as far as programming understanding was concerned.

Then, gracefully, Unity descended down from the heavens on a beam of light. It was just what I wanted and needed, and I got started right away.