Greg Back

Universal Monsters Online

admin — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 06:16:56 +0000

Uridium Wars

admin — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 22:30:08 +0000

Possessed

admin — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 03:44:28 +0000

Trailer

The evening’s dinner leaves you feeling sick. Shortly afterwards, you collapse on your bedroom floor and die, only to awaken as a ghost. Why did this happen? Who wanted you dead? Your spirit shall not rest until you find answers.

Possession

You may return to the world of the living by possessing the people and animals who still inhabit it. Masquerade through your castle with these forms, asking questions with the people most likely to get answers.

Manipulation

Ghosts can see people’s emotions. You can only control someone who is upset. To gain access to the most useful “puppets,” find ways to distress key characters.

Predators and Prey

Use animals to steal valuable trinkets – a cherished necklace, a prison key, a vial of poison… But watch where you wander as a vulnerable little critter. There are predators on the prowl ready to stop you in your tracks.

Consequences…

Haunt your lost home asking questions, confronting the guilty and manipulating those in your path. But beware the consequences your pursuit of revenge brings for your kingdom and loved ones. Before you find rest, you must undo the damage you have caused.

Production

My role: Level Designer and GUI Developer
Current Team: 10 members. One producer, three designers, three artists, two engineers.
Development: Production began in the Fall of 2010. The game spent four months in preproduction, and at the end of 2010 it was approved to go forward into production. It is currently being developed by a team of ten, slated for release in May 2011.
Technology: Made in Unity 3D using Maya for art, Git for version control, and Redmine for project management.

My Work

My role as level designer was to create the entire castle as a white box out of modular pieces to then give to the artists to replace with their assets. Because of the scale of the castle, we had to make sure that it was built from as many modular assets as possible. It was my responsibility to plan and make the modularity of the pieces that built the castle so that the artists only had to do the work of asset creation and had no planning on their plates. I also had to make sure that all of the levels fit the scale of the characters and interacted well with the camera system upon bringing them into Unity. This technical aspect of my job had to be balanced with planning the rooms for the placement of puzzles and quests.

I managed to bring the number of modular assets necessary for the construction of the castle down to a handful while making sure they fit with each other in any situation and could support the addition of assets like doorways with less reworking on the artists’ side.

UI Programming & Design

After the castle layout was complete, I delved into programming and designing the User Interface in C#. I created a transition and movement system for UI objects involving programmatic use of the Unity animation component to take advantage of animation curves and events.

My greatest challenge here was creating elegant transitions and designing scalable UI for any screen size or aspect ratio.

Optimization

In the last few weeks of the project I focused almost exclusively on Optimization. Working closely with the lead programmer, I implemented several iterations of occlusion culling systems and children combining scripts to greatly reduce the number of draw calls in the game.

Bugs With Guns

admin — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 23:56:59 +0000

Role: Lead Programmer

Team Size: 4

Below: an enemy NPC taunts the player through the chat system

Overview

Bugs With Guns is a Flash game that combines action gameplay and a unique narrative set in an online community. The gameplay primarily consists of arena combat action, where the player controls one of multiple available insect champions, and uses them to assist an AI-controlled army of ants against AI opponents with a similar army of ants and insectoid champions. This is wrapped in the context of an online multiplayer game, where the NPC players are presented as though they were human opponents, taunting and conversing with the player using pre-written lines. These pseudo-players form the community around the player, and their stories drive the plot of the game.

My Work

In my role as lead programmer I designed the project structure, the creation of the character, enemy and world loading classes, developed AI path finding for enemies, integrated the level building with the Ogmo level editor to ease the level design process along with a host of other tasks small and large that brought the project together.

NKCDC Sustainable

admin — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 01:31:49 +0000

Sustainable 19125 is a broad and innovative partnership among community residents, businesses, and numerous government, nonprofit, and for profit partners to green the Fishtown, Olde Richmond, and East Kensington neighborhoods of Philadelphia. Its goal is to make 19125 the most sustainable zip code in the city. This community-driven initiative is led by New Kensington Community Development Corporation (NKCDC), with support from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS).

My Work

The design and basic template files were developed by Allied Pixel and I was brought on to the project to develop the Google Maps Flash Application. The goal of the application was to bring the members of the New Kensington region of Philadelphia together to share the environmentally friendly actions they had taken, called Green Actions, with one another.

My work consisted of developing a flash application that connected with a Javascript submission system that made Ajax PHP calls to the database. Each user has a location on the map that lists their most recent green actions and profile listing all of them. When a user adds to the map through the sidebar, an Ajax call is made that updates the database then updates the Flash Application with their information placing that action first. I created the PHP scripts used throughout the site including the user profile area showing their actions and the bars showing top users and recent actions on the front page and sidebars.

Check It Out

The site is currently complete and will be officially launching over the next few weeks here. The final web release will appear online in the next few weeks on NKCDC’s web space.