Rollerdrome

In 2021 I joined the team at Roll7 to work on the BAFTA Award winning Rollerdrome, which launched in August 2022.

2023 Conference Talks

I spoke about Rollerdrome at GDC and Develop Conference! The talk aimed to give some insight into the processes I use when adapting to a new genre as a designer, using my experience on Rollerdrome as a case study.

Sadly those talks are unavailable to the general public, so I recorded a version of the talk accessible to everyone here:

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Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 – NSA Security Alert

Post-launch, I was part of the team delivering Classified Assignments to The Division 2, a series of DLC missions included in the Year 1 Pass. I was responsible for researching, planning, pitching, designing, implementing and polishing the missions in my remit, acting as the caretaker for this content from inception to release.

In this video, I walk through the mission and give some insights into the intentions behind the design:

Very special thanks to the environment artist for this mission, Patrick Metz.

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Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 – Rooftop Gardens

My main responsibility on the base game of The Division 2 was being the designer for one of the open world zones, researching, planning and implementing activities within that zone, including side missions. These are small linear missions, usually set inside one building or block, intending to provide around ten minutes of gameplay.

In this video, I walkthrough one of these side missions, Rooftop Gardens, and provide some insight into the intentions behind the design:

Thanks to environment artist for this mission, Patrick Metz.

Side missions like this were only a part of my responsibility on The Division 2 – for a more general insight into my role at Ubisoft Leamington, please visit this page.

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Ubisoft – Overview

Summary

I joined Ubisoft Leamington in 2017, working as a level designer on Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, working on the open world in the base game and then mission content for the Year 1 Pass. After a few months prototyping on an unannounced project in 2020, I started working remotely for Ubisoft Toronto, inheriting mission content as the project approached its final deadlines.

Projects

Tom Clancy's The Division 2
The Division 2 Year 1 Pass
Far Cry 6
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LEGO Dimensions – Sonic’s Adventure World

Whilst working at Tt Games I had the pleasure of being the designer for Sonic’s Adventure World in LEGO Dimensions. For Adventure Worlds within my remit, I was responsible for researching, planning, pitching, implementing and polishing the entire World, working with other disciplines to bring each one to life and up to final quality.

I’ve put together a video overview of the entire World, showcasing its content and explaining my involvement in detail:

This is a typical example of what goes into making an adventure world, and it’s a process I was a part of multiple times through Dimensions’ ongoing development; a general overview of what I do at Tt and what I’ve worked on can be found here.

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Multimedia II - Drag Queen

Multimedia II – Drag Queen

This is an old project, from my first year of University. It’s the first video game I ever made and it’s still one of my favourites, despite being extremely rough around the edges. It was the main project for the Multimedia II module, where, in pairs, we were tasked with creating a game using Adobe Director. Despite the technologies we were asked to use, I was thrilled to have made a game by the end of my first year, and the experience definitely gave me the game design bug.

If you wish to play the game, you can do so on this page. It requires the Shockwave plugin, and is at least 5 years old, so may not load correctly. If this is the case, I have provided some screenshots and animated gifs in the gallery at the bottom of the post.

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Individual Research Project - Genetic Algorithms

Individual Research Project – Genetic Algorithms

The major project of my final year was for my dissertation. I chose to research the effectiveness of dynamic learning algorithms in providing an adaptive, real-time finite state machine in a game environment. After doing a literature review to get up to speed on Bayesian networks, artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms, I chose to focus my research on the latter. I felt genetic algorithms could offer a working solution, and I was interested in programming one and seeing for myself exactly how it would work.

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High Performance Computing – Parallelisation of Pattern Matching using OpenMP and MPI

This final year project focussed on using the OpenMP and MPI frameworks to parallelise an implementation of the straightforward pattern matching algorithm. The project was scored purely on the speed of the solutions (assuming the generated matches were correct), and in the module overall I scored a strong first class mark of 83. I have put the code on my GitHub for your perusal.

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Week 10 – Go Right

Week 10 marks an exciting first for my Game a Weeks; happy collaboration. Please indulge in Go Right – download and play here.

The controls are explained in-game. If you absolutely have to mute the audio, press the M key.

Credits

I’m going to start this post off by giving a huge shout out and thank you to the four other people who contributed to the game.

Tom Lamey is the enigmatic hero responsible for the lovely character design and great spritesheets that bring the protagonist to life. He also advised me on the general look of the game

For the music I counted on the talents of the insatiable Jack Drewry. He brought together a couple of rag tag musicians to aid him, collectively they’re known as Squid Tooth, but separately they go by their birth names of Jack, Laurie and Rowan.

I hope you agree that these four all helped raise the bar on my games with their contributions. I’ll talk more about how it all came together below.

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