I've always wanted to get into game development. It's not easy, though. For this project I decided to try and learn something completely new. I didn't have much experience with Ruby as a programming language, but here was the DragonRuby Game Toolkit and a tutorial on how to make a simple Tetris-like game.
However, I couldn't just follow a tutorial then slap a price tag on it, so I took things further. I combed through various asset and sound libraries I'd purchased over the years through Humble Bundles and brainstormed ideas. I eventually came up with "Cube Tube", a variation of Tetris where you load cargo on a train.
I adjusted and tweaked and flipped everything on its side. I opened up MagicaVoxel and created a subway station and a voxel train, using those to generate my 2D art. I also found some music I kinda liked in my packs and tweaked and chopped it up to make a new soundtrack. I spent way too much time trying to make the music more dynamic; I initially wanted it to get faster and faster and the speed of the game increased. Unfortunately, it just ended up beyond my capabilities. People still like the music though, so that's cool.
I look at the code base now, and I wonder how much of it was actually in that original tutorial. Probably not much, anymore. I also tweaked the game for touch controls, and built and tested a mobile version, for both Android and iOS. It's also available on Windows, Mac and Linux.
It's not perfect, but I'm proud of it. It's a fun little time-waster. It plays well and it sounds great. And I did it all by myself. pats own back
This was a big project.
It started small enough. A system to print shelf tickets for a group of pharmacies. Of course, that had its own technical challenges. Not least of which was printing from a browser in such a way that it would be consistent with pre-printed and/or pre-perforated paper. We ended up developing an unobtrusive background application for windows that would handle communication with the printer, and a separate web system for creating the print jobs.
This expanded a lot. We built an entire visual editor for printible tickets with multiple dynamic labels and layouts of those labels. We also expanded the management side of the system to handle promotional periods and other forms of marketing. The idea became for marketing departments to create and upload assets and product pricing details, and the stores just had to log on and print what was relevant to them.
With nearly a thousand stores using the system, there was a lot of iteration around the UI/UX of the system, especially about making life easier for the store users. We also started handling support tickets and calls (myself included) in order to better assist the stores. This helped me put an emphesis on the UX design, as I got to know the kinds of people that were using the system (and designing things so I had less support tickets to attend do :P ).
Before I left, I was part of the management of the product as a whole, and was working on a big redesign and re-branding. Partially in an attempt to simplify the entire system, and to reach out to more non-pharmacy retail chains and outlets.
This was a javascript-based online game, built for the Gene Technology Access Centre (GTAC). I was mainly involved in the design phase, as opposed to the development, but what a design phase it was!
The goal of this game was to help teach VCE level students about the human immune system through an interactive game. Of course, this meant that the first step was to learn all about the human immune system. Over a period of many weeks, there were many discussions with the GTAC educators, alongside actual immunology experts, to get a handle on which cells play a role in the immune system and their function.
There was a lot of back and forth, gaining knowledge, assembling it and then confirming it with the experts. In the process, I think even the educators learned new things.
Afterwards, we had to translate the cells and their processes into game mechanics — attacking invading pathogens, recognising pathogens and utilizing the lymphatic nodes to produce appropriate T-Cells, sending out different forms of Dendritic Cells and acrophages... In the end it became an interesting (and hopefully entertaining) real-time strategy game. And I learned a lot about the immune system in the process.