2D Action Platformer with custom engine

Having grown tired of Unity’s waning support of their teamworking framework – which I required despite being a solo developer as I worked on multiple desktops and as there was a lot of tracking resources/assets in Unity, which did not have built-in support for Git, integrating that became very awkward.

Developing in my own engine (which was more of a library than a complete “modern” engine with various built-in utilities like Unity or Unreal) would mean that I could not create the levels in an editor like I was used to. Defining all the levels as scenes in code would have been extraordinarily tedious and inefficient, so I decided on writing prefabs such as levels, tiles, items and enemies in a custom YAML format. I decided on using Tiled to make the levels, which could output in a variety of formats but of course none of which were my custom YAML formats for maps. One of the formats is CSVs, which is almost perfect as it means I can create a Python script to convert between them.

Needless to say however that this is but one small part of the whole thing – I’m making an entire game with it’s own engine! Physics, art, music, enemies, story and all.

Call of Duty Black Ops 3 Mods

Using the modding tools released for Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 I have made significant progress on 3 separate maps in the game’s Zombies mode, all of which I consider to be ongoing though one is by far the front-runner in terms of actually getting a release. Though mostly a project that was done in the SDK and was simply building a map, this did require scripting in LUA for several components, e.g. linking zones so that when a player is in one zone, zombies will spawn in that zone and adjacent zones that have been opened.

The reason I have not released any of the maps is that I took a long hiatus from these mods during year 3 of university, as on top of education I was also working part-time and working on other projects. By the time I had returned almost 2 years later the bar for a “passable” zombies map had risen dramatically, the size and scale of the maps had gone up and the maps had begun to include scripted things like quests and rewards. Meaning my map that was oh so close to being released was suddenly laughable. This new bar is something I’d like to reach before releasing this map, releasing in the present day without features like this would mean a failure to make any impact or gain any traction.

FIFA / EA Sports FC Mod

This is an ongoing project with multiple components, the main ones being a colossal Excel spreadsheet and Python script. The purpose of this project is to randomly generate a “dream team” of players from a database of past and present footballers, restoring older players to their prime and doing the same for brought back retired ones. The spreadsheet contains data of what those players’ stats would look like in my opinion. The script randomly selects a squad of 25 players, and manipulates files the game uses to put those players into a selected team and swap out the stats for only those players with the enhanced stats in the database.

Additionally, I had started work on a database to export player appearances so players who retire, or players who are in the game but due to expired licencing are not included in future version, can be ported to said versions. However this second spreadsheet was abandoned when finding the right modding tools for the games that could be used to import/export the actual textures the game uses for well known players – as opposed to the generated faces used for player-made and lesser known players.

Edopro Mod

Edopro is an open-source YuGiOh emulator which allows for scripting custom cards, I am actively working on these LUA scripts to create cards and in a far greater capacity than I had expected; a script for building a database and deck for these cards that the program could use.

The reason it became necessary to make a management script is because all the original cards I had intended to make I keep track of an excel spreadsheet, with notes such as what the card’s text and effects are. However a card’s original text is, what it’s effect change is and what the new card text is etc. ~99% of the 4,300+ cards in this table are modified versions of cards that already exist and I did not think were strong enough so changed the effects of.

The intention of the whole thing is to build a deck of original and enhanced cards that goes well beyond the game’s normal limits. All meaning that this Frankenstein table has a mix of cards that already exist and do not change, cards that have new changed versions, and entirely original cards, plus data on how many of what belong in the deck

Both cards that were entirely original and were modified would go into this database as new cards (unlike with the FIFA mod and it’s players, which would overwrite them). This is because Edopro supports aliases – acknowledging that a card may have multiple versions due to Konami sometimes changing effects of cards that have the potential to break the game (Yu-Gi-Oh).