Fjell
A Story of a Girl and Her Hammer.
Year: 2020
Team:
Eric Beer / Deevanshu Trehan / Saleh Hassan / Ryan Rich / Tinghui Zhong
5 levels + 1 Intro level
Fjell as a project was a brain child of mine and fellow developer Robin Cowan where we wanted to have a character swinging around a giant hammer and smashing the world up. From the pitch we gave that idea was thing assigned to a group of students to then work on it as a thesis capstone project. It turns out that I ended up back on the game I had pitched for the following 14 weeks to try and get it all together.
I wore a lot of hats on this project as I tend to do, I organized the scrum meetings, the sprint meetings, I designed level 1 as well as the ‘opening’ level, the camera system, I designed the underlying systems with the hammer equipping, unequipping, attacking with it, environment destruction, calling the hammer, enemy AI, UI, audio, cut-scene animation, animating the main character and even acted as a mocap actor for said main character! This game was also interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic so alongside getting the lovely experience of having our teamwork interrupted in the middle of a very short turnaround production cycle we also had to suddenly switch from in person group work to remote work which now that all is said and done went SHOCKINGLY well considering the circumstances thanks to the entire teams willingness to maintain communication and a stellar pipeline of work.
I made all 7 tracks in the game and you can hear them all over on my music portfolio but here is a sample of the title theme for Fjell.
A play-through of :
Introduction Level, Level 1 and the final cutscenes.
Concept Art
Rocket Gal
Vs the alien menace
Year: 2019
Team:
Eric Beer / Paulina Roberts / Billy Mavrokefalos / Miriam Biro / Tinghui Zhong
5 levels
Rocket Gal was the first game where we as a team had to make the entire thing from scratch. The game is a Tower Defense where you play the titular Rocketgal, a mercenary employed in an attempt to fight of an alien invasion from the nasty, gooey Boid alien menace. She does this by flying around, and planting turrets!
I was in charge of making a lot of the mechanics we as a team outlined work. I made the flying, the shooting, all of the enemy AI / functions, as well as the functionality of the turrets. In addition I designed level 1 and worked with the team throughout the whole process to make sure we had a smooth difficulty curve along the levels. I also created many of the FX shaders used in the game such as Rocket Gals jetpack FX / UI and the lightbridges present in the game.
I also made the two songs present in Rocket Gal as well as several sound effects. Which you can hear here or on my Music Portfolio.
Rocket Gal Summary Video
Rocket Gal Full Play : 25mins
Treblemakers
Jazzin’ for a Good time.
Year: 2018
Team:
Eric Beer / Travis Armitage / Allan Makhoul / Ramon Baridó Navarro Lins / Tongling Ren
Treble makers was a 2.5D platformer where kids in a dystopian future-past try to cause trouble and get away from some authoritarian watch bots. I designed level 1 as well as several assets which you can see in my 3D Portfolio. In addition the team I worked with designated me as the art lead for the project and as such I was in part in charge for maintaining the tone and visuals we wanted throughout the game.
I was given a lot of trust in this regard by the team and I am grateful for the chance to do my part and help make this game what it was. I did a lot of UI design elements such as the Logo, buttons icons you see throughout the game as well as creating the basic template for how we were designing characters. In addition I worked with the team to develop a means of cohesively developing levels - you may notice that as the levels go on they inherently get more vertical with the starting level being completely horizontal (for the most part) and the last level being completely vertical (for the most part). This was due to my prior experiences making platformers that I made the claim that it was always more difficult to move vertical than horizontal and we should design the difficulty progression of our levels around that.
The 2.5D engine was made by Tom Sutherland, one of our Professors.
I also made the backing music for the entire game which you can hear below or over on my music portfolio.
Credits:
Year: 2018
Art / Assets / Design / Audio: Eric Beer
Music:
Speedy Speedy Boy by Marco Polo
Neon Rush by Noah Damus
Code: Tom Sutherland
Miami Rush was for an infinite runner assignment we got, wherein we had to design a runner game based solely on an engine built by one of the Professors of the course. My game was called Miami Rush where you play Punk Copp, a loose cannon cop trying to get Super-Cocaine off the streets of Neo Miami. I experimented a bit with dialogue, proper implementation of sounds as well as more dynamic menus. I’m still really happy with a lot of visual design I did in this game and the extra steps I took to get Punks talking car K.A.T. into the start of the game to tell the player the controls.
I don’t know when and I don’t know how but Punk Copp is for sure going to show up in one of my projects later.
Definitely NOT Flappybird
Year: 2018
So this was an initial assignment we got to learn the ropes of Unity, using a visual scripting tool called Playmaker. We basically just had to make a small game where you could die and have points, the prof at the time basically banner any versions of flappy bird because apparently a lot of students in prior years had decided to remake that game. So being the cheeky bugger than I am, I decided to make Definitely NOT Flappybird.
This game you basically control a drill digging with a constantly depleting fuel source, the points are based on time spent traveling. You can turn the drill up or down, and you need to collect fuel to go as long as possible. I experimented with modular level loading so the level will actually go on forever with some 'prebuilt chunks’ loading in and out as you go through the game. There were also pockets that were not solid dirty so you could fall through them, a particular part of this I was very proud of was having the sound of the drill get less muffled when you werent in dirt.
