Projects

I've worked on quite a few projects over the years. This list is a good sampling of what I've been up to.

• The Experimental Gameplay Project (2005): In the BVW section, I mentioned that a week wasn't enough time to get much done. Well on the Experimental Gameplay Project, we tried to make a new game from scratch every week for a total of ten weeks. It is true that one week isn't much time, and when you're prototyping at that rate a lot won't turn out very good, but every once in a while things just come together. Check out my best work in the demos section.
  We were also featured in BusinessWeek and PC Gamer.
• Panda3D (2005): For my spring project class, I worked on maintaining the Panda3D engine. The focus of the project was to make what was already there more usable. Towards that goal I wrote a new exporter plugin for 3D Studio Max and a dozen tutorials that now come with the installation package.
• Pleasuremount Airplanes! (2005): This was my final project for the Game Design class I took spring semester. The concept, which was created by my partner Brian Hagan, is to rearrange people on an airplane to make them as happy as possible.
• Building Virtual Worlds (2004): Building Virtual Worlds, or bvw for short, is the first major project course that everyone takes at the Entertainment Technology Center. There is so much to tell about it that it has its own section on this site.
• Comics Browser (2005): I used to read newspaper comics every day at home, but when I moved to college I began to miss them. I also got sick of having to go to dozens of pages to read all of my comics, not to mention the fact that they are usually full of ads and can take a long time to load. So in 2003 I quickly created a page to load the current day's comics automatically. However, the method was too simple and only worked for about a third fo the comics. Now I use a php version that runs with a MySQL database that is robust, customizable, and saves the comics for future reference. There are plenty more features planned, but it's good enough for general use for now.
• Shadow Door (2003): This was the honors project I worked on with Northwestern PHD student Robert Zubek. It uses a hack for Bioware's Neverwinter Nights that allows any programming language to get information about the gamestate from an NPC and to give the NPC commands in return. By providing this interface, one could implement AI that's very difficult in Aurora script. I used this interface to research if a technique called Q-learning could be used to figure out which of an NPC's weapons are optimal for a given battle based on previous encounters.
• Mapwelder (2002): This was made as a mapping tool for an MMORPG that didn't have automaps. This was a great project since it was simple both to code and to use, worked well, and was well used. Full details are available on the project page.
• Bust-a-Cube (2002): This was made as the final project in my first graphics class at Northwestern. This was my first time making a game, and one of my first time's using OpenGL. Still, it went beyond what the rest of the class did and won an award as the best project in the class. A full description of it is in the zip file.
• Javascript Snakes (2003): I programmed this over a weekend to see if it was possible to make a version of Snakes (a.k.a. Nibbles) purely in Javascript, and therefore playable by all browsers without plugins.