Red Chasm

Red Chasm is a first person puzzle platformer set in the ruins of an alien civilization on Mars. Explore the Martian Black Zone in a race against time against the military and your own sanity.

This game was developed with the Minionworks team for the Edge Create Challenge in 2012. Though we didn't end up winning, we did get featured in the "best of the rest," and general reviews seem positive. Red chasm can be played for free in your browser over at the Minionworks website, or downloaded for Windows and Mac from either the aforementioned Minionworks page or from its IndieDB page.

Karst

Karst is a video game that I am working on with some friends from UVic. We've put quite a bit of time into it so far. We are building most of it from the ground up, although we are also using Unity for some of the heavy lifting. Not a whole lot of pretty pictures yet, but keep an eye out.

This has been an incredible learning experience for all of us. Monetary profit would be nice but it is not being counted upon at this stage.


Dawn of War: Age of the Damned

Many moons ago, I made a mod for the original Dawn of War. Though the mod was never fully completed, it was the impetus that pushed me to get a degree in Computer Science. Though now completely outdated, documentation of its existence is still present online. If you are interested in taking a gander into my past, you can view it here.


I didn't have a lot of project-based courses during my degree (which is a shame, because that is a work environment I tend to excel at; I found most class assignments to be regurgitated knowledge-bites rather than something meaty enough to work with). Still, there are two projects that I feel are worth mentioning here.

Culling Improvements for a variable environment
CSC 471: Fundamentals of Computer Rendering
Programmed using C++, OpenGL, and Cinder

Our stated goal in this project was to develop a polygon culling technique that functioned equally as well in an outdoor environment as an indoor environment. We didn't end up succeeding at this task, but we weren't meant to, primarily because at the time I took the class a solution had not been discovered. We did, however, successfully implement a few classic culling techniques (such as frustum and octrees) with some fairly bleeding edge improvements (specifically, using pseudo-random numbers to speed up the octree parsing, allowing it to be a fairly static time regardless of the complexity of the tree itself).

Fully Featured Social Media Site
CSC 370: Database Systems
Programmed using PostgreSQL, JSP, and HTML

This project is pretty much what it says on the tin. A fully featured social media site (a la Facebook and Twitter) featuring account creation, friends, groups, posting statuses, searches, session management, the whole nine yards. It wasn't pretty (this was a class for programmers, not artists, after all), but it worked. This project provided the basis for designing this website (especially the simple-but-effective blogging setup I included in the design).

Ray Tracer
CSC 305: Introduction to Computer Graphics
Programmed using C++ and Qt

Again, this one is fairly self explanatory. This was a scratch-coded Ray Tracer (with a bit of help from Qt for image file IO). It made pretty pre-rendered pictures. Like this one:

Everything

This is a short story that I wrote for inclusion in an anthology produced through the Whitechapel forum (which is filled with creative and motivated people). The restrictions for the anthology were two-fold. First, it had to be about someone or something being somewhere he/she/it shouldn't. Second, it had to be short; no longer than 1000 words. I feel pretty good about my end product here, though I may go back at some point in the future and expand upon it. There is definitely more story to be told here.

If you feel so inclined, you may purchase the book, or maybe pick up a kindle version.


I did a lot of writing during my degree, what with the Philosophy minor and all. Unfortunately, a lot of it makes very little sense outside the context of class discussion. There are a few pieces I still rather like, however.

Transmetropolitan: A Review
FA 335: History of Comic Book Art

This was one of the coolest courses I took. It covered the history of comics and graphic novels from its inception (including all of the background art that played a part in its creation) all the way up to the modern day. For my final paper, I wrote a review of Transmetropolitan (written by Warren Ellis and penciled by Darick Robertson). Transmetropolitan is easily my favorite comic book/graphic novel, and potentially my favorite creative work of all time. Yes, it's that good.

A Proposal To Improve the Cunningham Woods Path
Engr 240: Technical Writing

This class was mostly a bust, primarily serving to drastically lower my expectations for the average writing ability of university students. However, I (rather surprisingly) ended up with a team of students that actually knew what they were doing. I think our end product was pretty good, and it deserves mention because it's currently the longest written work I have produced (clocking in at 23 pages before all of the recorder's documents).

As an aside, for a supposed Technical Writing course, the teacher was awfully fond of size 15 bold Comic Sans for all of her printed material (of which there was a massive amount). Shameful.

The Rise of the Popular Zombie
Engl 135: Academic Reading and Writing

I wrote a short piece about the history of zombies in popular culture. Not much else to add, other than mentioning that it was a drastically different topic than what the rest of the class tended towards (primarily hot-button issues, like cancer and human rights).

It's little surprise that I love Minecraft. Not only is Minecraft one of the most successfully realized and enjoyable games I have ever played, it is a great story of being the little indie game that could. It's rare that a game can be industry-changing, highly polished and enjoyable at the same time.

Recently, I have turned my old computer into a dedicated Minecraft server. It runs a very minimal Arch Linux install, and I've implemented a few extra features on it, such as hourly backups.


Over time I have participated in a number of Alpha and Beta tests. Here's the list of all that I can remember at the time of writing.

• Auto Assault
• Firefall
• City of Villains
• Fallen Earth
• Rift
• Tabula Rasa
• Black Prophecy
• Champions Online
• Star Trek Online
• Battlefield: Heroes
• Hellgate London
• Mythos
• Dungeons and Dragons Online
• Star Wars: Battlefront 2
• Perpetuum Online
• LEGO Universe
• Pirates of the Burning Sea