The Sirena Expedition started as my entry into the Haunted PS1 Summer of Shivers jam in 2021. The initial Jam version was made over a two-month period, but after getting a pretty good reception for the game, I decided to flesh it out into a full project. After two years of development, I released the finished game on the 26th of October 2023. You can buy it on Steam and Itch.io, and visit the website at https://www.sirenaexpedition.com/.
Dot Gobbler in Sock Justice
I decided to learn how to make games in PICO-8 by creating a ‘90s-style platformer starring Dot Gobbler, for Wizard Jam 9 (although I overshot the deadline by quite a long way). The game is a short exploratory Metroidvania, where you collect socks which affect your movement abilities, allowing you to reach new areas.
Untitled Shoot-’em-up Roguelike (Hiatus)
This was an ongoing project of mine for some time, and was largely an opportunity for me to get to grips with procedural generation. I’d got the procedural city generation to a point that I was happy with, but the mechanics didn’t feel great, and at the time I wasn’t really sure if I could make it work. I would like to go back to this at some point and see if I can make it fun to play, but for now I’ve decided to focus on other things.
Tactical Gamer Chair
Tactical Gamer Chair was my entry into Wizard Jam 8, and was again quite heavily physics-focused. The initial plan was to have the chairs slide down the hill entirely using physics, but it quickly became clear that this was unfeasible, so I wrote my own movement code. Out of all of my Jam games, this feels like the one I could do the most with, given some proper time and attention.
“Veggie” Panino and the Nightmare Puzzler
Made for Wizard Jam 5, “Veggie” Panino and the Nightmare Puzzler started with the idea of slotting vegetables together to make a panini, after which the titular chef would sweep your handiwork onto the floor. The original intention was to work horror elements into the game, with stranger and stranger things happening as you progressed. The vegetable-placement mechanics ended up taking a long time to get working, however, so the game ended up being more of a traditional puzzle game.
Business Guys on Planes
Made for Wizard Jam 4, Business Guys on Planes was an (unsuccessful) attempt to make something smaller-scale. The flight mechanics are fairly stripped-down, but the game turned into a big open-world map to explore, which ended up being time-consuming to make. I did also have fun with the physics (it was the first time I’d managed to get UE4’s temperamental ragdoll physics to work with models exported from Blender), and the picture-in-picture camera.
Dot Gobbler
My second Wizard Jam game, made for Wizard Jam 2016, I was much more happy with the progress I made on this. I was able to work on it full-time, so that helped, and I got help from 5 of 6 for the music. The game is a remake of a C64 Pac-Man knock-off of the same name; I initially had plans to make an isometric adventure game using the character, but scaled back to just a Pac-Man clone when I realised there was no way I'd have time for that!
Nineties Cockpit Freakout
I initially made this for the first Wizard Jam, a game jam on the Idle Thumbs forums, and used it as a way of learning the basics of UE4 and Blender modelling. The game I submitted for the jam was completely unfinished, though, and didn't have much in the way of gameplay! Other notable absences were sound effects or music of any kind, a title screen, and functionality for about half of the buttons. I revisited the game for EGX Rezzed 2016, where I exhibited it in the Leftfield Collection, and basically spent a month fleshing it out. Watching people play the game gave me lots of useful feedback and ideas, and I did plan on getting the game ready for Steam Greenlight, but eventually I decided that I'd prefer to funnel the effort required to do that into a new project.
StormCat Games
Pub Crawler
Along with a friend, I participated in Ludum Dare 40, which had the theme ‘The more you have, the worse it is’. I took on the art and music responsibilities, and the 3-day time constraints resulted in the visual style; without the time to rig and animate characters, the decision was made to have them look like toys that bobbed about, which was effective when combined with the narrow depth of field.
Triassic Park
Joined by a third team member, Triassic Park was our entry into Ludum Dare 41, which had the theme ‘Combine 2 Incompatible Genres’. The game was a combination of Stealth and Theme-park management, and saw you tending to dinosaur enclosures, without being seen by them. As before, I took on art responsibilities.
TriCat Games
During 2015 and 2016, I was one half of TriCat Games, which was a full-time indie project. Check out our Facebook page to see what we made!