No public info yet...
Modeller is in my opinion as of 2024 the best tool to create primary forms and model your thoughts into 3d. The tool supports both a sparse voxel grid with narrow band signed distance fields, ala Medium Clay and also implicit non destructive boolean signed distance function shapes ala Dreams. It works in both VR and flatmode. Though I do believe VR is the key. It also has the experience of the Substance teams and backing of Adobe, one of the largest players in the creative tool space.
I started on the Dreamiverse team and worked on some of the social systems. I developed a spatial organisation tool called Overview to visualise 3d content in a 2d canvas, which was out of scope for the launch.
My passion and what I spent the most time developing was the recommendation engine and categorisation system, including a semantic tagging system with support for localisation.
The bulk of my work was rewriting the server infrastructure with Alex Evans & Alex Parker. AAA is a custom-built c++ monolith server deployed on Kubernetes with a handbuilt DB. It provides a range of social functions and serves as a lightweight social network centred around the User Generated Content uploaded to it. My focus was on recommendation, Twitch integration, community challenges, tagging system and other social systems. Further work is not yet public... I will update this when it is.
Climax brought me on for then Harry Potter Wonderbook series due to my mix of creative and technical skills.
Within a month of joining due to my passion for the project, technical expertise and love for the IP I was design lead on the Climax side.
My duties involved working closely with Sony and the IP holder to rapidly prototype what was possible with the platform while staying true to the IP constraints.
I was brought on as a programmer and designer. I designed and implemented all the next-gen social features which at the time were still in development.
Broadcast+ an innovative streaming gameplay mode, Companion App using AngularJS, and a variety of features which pushed the services layers of PSN all without the need for a hosted server.
The project was exciting as I was a vertical stack from high level concept to low level platform allowing swift innovation on a moving platform.
8Realms is an HTML-based empire-building massively multiplayer online strategy game developed by Jagex Games Studio.
The brief was to create an asynchronous massive strategy game which could operate on a wide selection of browsers while developing the in-house web technology with minimal griefing.
Players are expected to progress through researching and constructing to gain culture in order to progress to the next age. Culture can be gained faster by capturing various luxuries found scattered throughout the map with army forces. Players reach the next age by reaching 100% culture and by building a wonder. There are 8 ages in 8Realms: Ancient, Classical, Feudal, Renaissance, Imperial, Industrial, Modern and Future.
Glo is a relaxing light based puzzle game, focusing on providing a beautiful experience. Filled with interesting challenges this is the first internal IP Mere-Mortals managed to launch.
So I took two animactics, a bag of concepts and went off and made the prototype on the iPhone. After some initial interest at some conferences it was decided to move it to Samsung Bada and move into full production. At which point for the first time I closed my IDE and went full time to design.
Challenges all over the place and lessons to be learned. Samsung Bada platform was not finalised as we were a launch title, a first for us. It was our first phone game, and the first game with an in-house designer.
Other than core game-play design choices which needed to be made the feel was the most important thing to polish and maintain. The levels had to flow without frustration as it would break all the hard work the artists had put in to relaxing you.
I have to bow to the art team they did a really fab job on this one.
This was a great project to work on full of opportunities. A family quiz game it really shone in multiplayer. Sadly we didn't get the balance quite right between single player and multiplayer. Also the majority of players were doing single player which was a shame as the game really came into its own in multiplayer.
I love the mascots, my favourite was Demon Panda. Then a marketer dumped on the Punk Lampire for not being appealing, he quickly became my favourite. My favourite game modes are: One Small Step, Odd One Out, and Labyrinth. I really am terrible at the memory games.
This was a project that exploded in many ways in scale and scope. I learnt a lot from this project. It was great working with Blitz who were really open communicators. It's thanks to this project I found my passion design, despite previously having done design I had always overlooked it as I was doing a jack of all trades kinda thing.
I only lightly touched this project as there was a large overlap with Encleverment. My handiwork is most evident in the Skeet Shooting Game.
A fun little collection of sports mini-games. I highly recommend Dodge-ball, Alex did a fab job of polishing that to a fine sheen. It's fun and looks gorgeous. This was biggest project Mere-Mortals has yet undertaken.
Rae's baby, she did all the heavy lifting on this project. Though I was brought in for several games logic and AI. Writing an A* that doesn't chomp memory is quite a challenge and was very interesting.
Aaah the harsh salt of reality, this game was my first introduction to circumstances beyond your control. This game started life as a DS game with a publisher who right near the end of the project went bust. Mere-Mortals then decided to split them up, give them some more polish and release as several DSi Ware packs.
So I arrive in the office on my first day, I'm shown to my desk and within a few hours I have a massive task list and I'm debugging the crunch time project. Darts was my crash course into the world of games.
It has to be said the game really captures PDC Championship. Don't believe me, turn on the TV and watch it side by side. Not only did we get an official commentator, but also mo-cap of darts players.
I worked mostly on debugging and some mini-games on this project.