Portfolio

Unreal Engine

A showcase of what I made with Unreal Engine 5

JALF - Current main Project

Basic Info

“Just a little further”, or “JALF” for short, is my most ambitious project. It’s a first-person precision platformer focused on careful planning, exploration, and rewarding the player for their curiosity, awareness, and willingness to take risks.

Please keep in mind that the shown game content is a work in progress.

Below are a few aspects of the game explained in more detail, accompanied by videos and pictures. If you want more videos about the game, please check out my YouTube channel.

Gameplay

The player has to progress through a map by smart use of terrain, momentum and a charge jump mechanic fine-tuned for more precise jumping. While the movement mechanic by itself is simple, the game will feature multiple environments, with each one offering a unique experience to spice up the progression. A big part of the game will also be looking for alternative or secret paths to progress, navigating through dark places with a lantern and throwable glowsticks, unlocking shortcuts and checkpoints, and collecting treasures.

Narrative, World Building

In this game, you play as a resilient stone golem who is sent on a mission to power up a machine close to the center of the species’ home planet’s moon to stop it from collapsing and crashing into the planet.

The player will travel through multiple environments that will each bear a sort of abandoned, rusty, and overgrown look, like an abandoned mineshaft or a power plant. Additionally, they will be able to find bits of lore over the map. Currently thinking about adding a small number of NPCs too.

The player will start with a simple overview of the main objective, but after that, it will be up to them to piece the story together.

Level Desing

A big goal for me is to use zero invisible walls or objects with no collisions, to truly allow the player to get creative with the way they progress through the game, and explore every nook and cranny if they so desire. It’s a bit of a challenge to keep a good balance between having too many ways to progress and also keeping a good challenge, but conveniently, the voxel environment allows for precise measuring for all individual jumps, as each voxel represents 1 meter. The locations themselves are very spacious and vertical, since the entire game takes place in a giant fantastical cave system, which is complemented very well by the fact that the player can jump up to 10 meters high. While the jump high can be difficult to design around, it allows for more natural-looking environments and a more epic experience where the player can do massive leaps and progress through the big caves quickly if they are skillful enough.

Below is a rough summary of how I make these environments, and a picture from when I was still making the layout of the location.

Visual Style

The game features a hand-made voxel environment with low-poly models and lumen lighting for extra detail. Both terrains and models are made more stylized with pixel art textures. I also enhanced the individual materials with things like normal maps to reduce flatness, metallic maps, a system that helps reduce the texture repetitiveness, etc.

Below are some examples of the general visual mood of the game, both in tight and open spaces, and then a little showcase of how I improved the look of terrain and models with the use of some Unreal’s systems.

The softwares I use for textures and models are MagicaVoxel, Blockbench, Blender, Aseprite and Gimp. It’s worth mentioning that I optimize these models for better performance by lowering the number of faces to a minimum and by triangulation.

Unreal Engine learning project

As my learning project for UE5, I created an environment using some of Unreal’s systems, like Landscaping and Folliage, but also things that can’t be properly seen in the static image, like wind and LODs.

I also used this environment to create a simple game where the player has to shoot projectiles at targets, which crumble and add to a counter when hit. If the player hit all targets within a time limit, they would win the game, or have to restart. Unfortunately, I can’t get footage of this at this point.

Pixel Art

Past Projects

How I began

Nuget

A game I made as a graduation project in Unity. The game is a sort of story-driven puzzle game, acting as an inside joke for the individual people featured in it. It features a main menu, a pause menu, an animated player character, an inventory, an interaction system, dialogs, pixelart of different characters and items, sound effects, and two chiptune soundtracks, usage of tile maps, etc.

Sokoban

A simple game I created as a school project in a WPF App in C#. The goal is to fill all the green spots with boxes. It features a menu, a few levels, and some of my first art I ever made. The game is made with the help of two-dimensional arrays, as each number from 0-4 represents a different tile in the level.

Domino

I created this game as a school project in a WPF App in C#. To win, you must match the numbers on the rectangles and get rid of your entire playing hand. Unlike in the real version, you can only place the rectangles left or right. It features a simple UI and two players taking turns. The game works by attaching the corresponding numeric values to each domino piece and then by checking the end and start of two dynamic arrays/lists.