Dennis Pishik

Gladiatr0nz

ganymede51 — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:22:12 +0000

Gladiatr0nz is a text-based Arena Battler game. The user starts out as a generic brawler and fights in the Arena to gain money. This money is then used to upgrade weapons and armor to more easily defeat opponents. Opponents are randomly generated based on the player character’s stats. I did all of the design and programming work on this project completely solo.

Language: C++

Source Code (PDF Format): Header Files | Source Files | Main.CPP

About Trade Secret

ganymede51 — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 22:04:44 +0000

Trade Secret is a 2.5D action platformer game developed for play in web browsers. It’s built in Unity3D. The game started out as a student project and grew into a huge extracurricular project. Working on Trade Secret has been an amazing experience. I started out doing scripting on the project and eventually moved to level design. I am also the QA Lead on the project. The other posts in this portfolio describe in greater detail some of the level design work that I’ve contributed to this project. Included below is a sample QA plan that I’ve written up for an earlier version of the game.

Sample QA Plan: Download DOCX

The most recent beta version of Trade Secret is currently playable at TradeSecretGame.com

Building Hopping

ganymede51 — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 08:51:29 +0000

At it’s core, Trade Secret is a platformer game, and I wanted to play around with those mechanics. This area is the natural continuation of the roof hopping level. By now the players have come up from the sewers, onto rooftops, and now they’re getting inside of some ruined apartment buildings. There were a lot of little details that I had to pay attention to, especially with the placement of the platforms. I had to try to space them out so that some areas would be accessible only via the super-jump and others would be accessible with regular or super jumps. ”Adjust and test” was definitely my mantra for this area, because being off a little bit was just enough to make an otherwise fun area become really aggravating.

Roof Hopping

ganymede51 — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 08:41:17 +0000

Initially, this level was built into the Rooftop Construction level, but with the axis-swapping that would have taken place in the other level, it just wouldn’t work out. Another thing that I needed to consider was the fact that Trade Secret is a browser based game, so in order to help keep loading times and draw calls down, we split the areas in two. This area looked much different initially, but some of the art assets couldn’t be created in time, so I had to go back and incorporate existing assets into the level and try to keep the atmosphere the same.

Rooftop Construction

ganymede51 — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 08:23:25 +0000

This particular area I had planned on building from the start. Since Tier 3 of Trade Secret is set in a slum, I figured that anyone living there would have to be resorting to doing whatever they could to survive. I didn’t want to have a sense of complete hopelessness, so I wanted to have an area that showed some kind of construction to show that people were still able to make the best of things. The Sons of Salvage, a guild of engineers which the player is part of, are trying to work for the benefit of all Under Haven, after all, so it would make sense to see some of their handiwork in trying to make things better.

The challenge with this level was in making an area which was completely traversable. It is possible to completely circumnavigate the platformed construction area, so I had to make things look good from all angles. Another issue I had was that the axis-swapping mechanics would break if the player went left to the transition before going right, so I needed to place a large enough obstruction in the way to make it so that the players couldn’t jump over it from one side, but could still get back if they went around from the right.

Monorail Graveyard

ganymede51 — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 08:21:43 +0000

We needed an area to connect the sewers to the city ruins above, and creating such an area was one of my first Level Design tasks. I was thinking about what I might find in a futuristic society, and originally had planned on simply coming up into a building, when I remembered an interesting sequence from Final Fantasy 7. In it, Cloud and company end up in the Midgar sewers and then make their way through a train graveyard to get back to the Sector 7 slums. I thought that a similar area for us would be perfect for a futuristic steampunk type game; also, in a way, this is my homage to one of the first games that made me realized that gaming had value beyond simple entertainment. There were so many ways for the player to navigate, because players could move through monorail cars as well as on top of or under them. This level was definitely the one I had most fun in designing.

VisioPong

ganymede51 — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 04:18:16 +0000

VisioPong started out as a programming experiment. I wanted to play around with collision detection, but I wanted to find a way of making things more dynamic. I have a red ball bouncing around the screen, there are tiny blue squares which the ball can bounce off of, which is an interesting start, but it’s a little boring. Being bored, I started to wonder whether the ball had ever actually hit all of the boxes, so I added various trails to the ball to see whether it had. It didn’t.

This led to another problem, though; sometimes I just really wanted to be able to give the ball a nudge in one direction or another to help it along, so I added in basic controls. Now, I could control the velocity of the ball to some extent. This was a lot more fun to watch, a lot more dynamic, and had some degree of interactivity. I played around with the trails a little bit and eventually decided that having ellipses of various shapes, colors, and opacities would be fun and give an added sense of depth. Eventually, though, the amount of colors on the screen grew to be too much to handle, so I added in a timer which would basically reset the program every 30 seconds.

It’s not a game, I know, but it’s a fun experiment with collision and velocity. It holds people’s attention for just long enough to let them get interested, but not long enough to be boring, and that’s probably the biggest lesson I learned from this. Timing is important, catching people’s attention is important. Hopefully, you can hang onto that attention long enough to get people interested in paying more attention and seeing what other kinds of interesting things can happen if they stick around long enough.

Language: Processing

Source Code: Download PDF

Meddlesome Monsters

ganymede51 — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 03:36:09 +0000

Awards: Mini Ludum Dare – 3rd place Overall, 2nd place Innovation.

Meddlesome Monsters is a game created for the 30th mini Ludum Dare which took place over the period of November 4th 2011 – November 6th 2011, the theme of which was “Adaptation”. I worked on a team of seven people; I was the only game designer, but one of a few programmers. The game I came up with was a Competitive Co-op action puzzle game, similar to the Capcom classic Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo. The twist to this game, however, is that it pits two teams of two players against each other. Nobody who worked on this game, myself included, had ever participated in a Ludum Dare or Game Jam event, so the fact that we placed within the Top 3 of two categories was really rewarding.

Different colored monsters are dropping into all of the players playing field. The goal of the game is to match up similar colored monsters and drop poison onto them. If you drop a poison onto a monster of the matching color, then it will destroy all monsters of that color who are adjacent to each other. Destroying monsters in this way will drop blobs of monster remains in your opponents’ playing field – the more monsters destroyed, the more blobs you drop! These blobs can’t be destroyed, so players must adapt to the obstacles as they try to get bigger chains off.

Each pair of players has their own play field of five columns and a shared space of four columns adjacent to it. In this way, we also incorporated the secondary theme of “Togetherness”. This added an extra strategic element to the game in that 2 players could cooperate in order to achieve bigger and better combos to screw over their opponents with.

Along with designing all of the mechanics for the game, I also did some programming – mainly created the function which was used to calculate how many garbage blocks (the blobs) to drop on the opponent.

While I am under NDA in regards to the code and engine, if you’d like more information on the custom engine, please visit the Exsto Engine website.

Status: In-Progress

Game Design Doc: Download DOCX | Download PDF

Language: JavaScript

L4D Scenario Sleeve

ganymede51 — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 21:50:37 +0000

This is what the Left 4 Dead scenario sleeve looks like before players put a scenario into play.

Disclaimer: Left 4 Dead is the property of Valve Software. I do not own it!

L4D Board Game in Action

ganymede51 — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 21:49:15 +0000

In the Overworld map post, I explained that the system I came up with for movement in this board game required 2 boards. The Overworld map was the first, serving as a waypoint system to show the players where they were in relation to their goal. This is the second, it’s a sleeve that players can insert pre-printed scenario cards into. The scenario cards are based on a tile system, and we had a rulebook which gave layouts for where the players started, as well as the numbers and locations of any zombies that appeared. Every turn of the game equated to mere seconds in real time, so players had to think carefully about their actions. Zombies always move after players do, and will always move toward the closest player. Having this dual board system allowed us to retain the feel of Left 4 Dead despite the inherently slower pace of a board game versus a shooter.

Download Rules: L4D Board Game DOCX

Disclaimer: Left 4 Dead is the property of Valve Software. I do not own it!