Academia, Level Design, and Game Development
In 2023 I was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosphy (PhD) for my work and subsequent viva voce defence of my thesis titled: Mixed Reality Level Design Workflows. My thesis expores how augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies can be used to improve existing level design workflows and to develop additional workflows …
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The term substitutional reality (SR) is used to describe systems or experiences that integrate real world objects into a fully virtual environment with varying levels of accuracy. Real world objects are matched with digital proxies that allow a developer to transport the player to a completely virtual world, such as a futuristic space ship, but …
Our LevelEd VR system was built to explore how virtual reality can assist or improve the level design process. The initial focus was on improving or assisting the level creation process for virtual reality games by allowing designers to prototype levels in VR. We felt that there would be benefits to creating virtual reality game …
The Game Take Us Home is a shooter game based on the popular 70s/80s game, Asteroids. The player controls a space ship that must protect the orbiting planets from an asteroid attack whilst the planetary colonists evacuate. The player must ensure as many colonists make it to the rescue ship before it leaves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr2JTN-xrEM Full …
LevelEd AR is an iOS application and workflow aimed at using consumer grade technology to allow users to quickly and effectively create a digital map of a space so that it can be used for serious games built with Unity. LevelEd AR is built with ARKit 1.0 and is supported on most modern iPhone and …
Working as part of Dungeon Defenders Community Development Team (CDT) gave me the opportunity to bring some of my own work into the full game. Tomb of Etheria was developed for a contest several years ago and is highly popular and well rated on the Dungeon Defenders’ Steam workshop, so this was an obvious candidate. …
The Game BADBOIDZ is a 2.5D 80s inspired puzzle game. The player controls the ship and transmits their movement to the BADBOIDZ. They must guide their BADBOIDZ to the portal to win whilst watching out for the traps along the way. The game makes use of a boids flocking system (built by James Sillet) with the unique spin that they will always …
The level design concept was created for Alien Breed 2: Assault developed by Team 17. The concept was developed to fit into the Alien Breed story universe and also to fit in with the Alien Breed game play style as a potential DLC map.
Camp Hope is a 3 mission campaign for L4D2, which takes roughly 30 minutes to complete. The campaign is set in a military base in the woods of Vermont and is nick named Camp Hope by other survivors. The map supports offline single player, online co-op and online versus game modes.
I worked on this project in my spare time and it took around a month and a half to go from the planning stages to a playable map. A large section of time was spent play testing the level and iterating on geometry and game play feedback. The map is now fully playable from start to finish and would be ready for an environment artist to come on board and start detailing the level.
Tomb of Etheria was a map created by myself and Antony O’Sullivan for the Dungeon Defenders mapping contest using the Dungeon Defenders Development Kit (a custom version of UDK). The brief was to create a map that supports up to 6 players for the standard game type. We spent about a month working on the …