During my time in Japan, I have finally found time to play Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition as a Dungeon Master. I always wanted to play in the past learning the 3.5 edition rules, but I had no time or opportunity when I worked at Rockstar.
This has been a great tool to meet people, which led to me creating the Japan Gaming Hub, a gaming group for English expats in Japan on Facebook. I've been running three games online with the people that joined, and two of those games are still being ran each week. I've even run a simplified version of the game for my school kids, and oh boy, murder hobos the lot of them. (ﾟAﾟ;)
This also led to me collaborating on making an article for the Connect AJET local expat magazine, explaining how to start D&D for newbies, and how to use it online as a tool to meet people.
After 7 years in the games industry, I have left Rockstar to take a short break to teach English in Japan on the Jet Programme, an English language cultural exchange programme.
Here I am teaching four different senior high schools, each with about 3-4 classes full of 42 kids, fun English lessons. I'm placed in rural south Japan, in the prefecture of Okayama.
It has been a great way to work on my presentation, language and communication skills.
It was always my intention to travel and using this job to allow me to network and apply for game industry work here in Japan, but it has been difficult due to the pandemic that struct half way into my first year, just as I adapted to my job fully.
I have not added much here in a while due to working at Rockstar Games for roughly six years.
My time was largely taken up by overtime and learning the testing practices or creating content there, so my portfolio feels a bit lacking. Due to my NDA I am unable to directly refer to the specific things I developed, however I can tell you what games and released DLC packs I worked on between 2014-2019.
Rockstar Lincoln - Functionality Tester
I joined Rockstar Lincoln during the release of GTA Online in January 2014 as a temporary tester.
Here I worked on their multiplayer testing team from the first few DLC packs, starting with the Beach Bum pack. I managed to obtained a fulltime contract when I was promoted to compliance tester after switching between many different roles.
As a compliance tester, I tested on multiple platforms during the release of many DLC packs, and also as the next generation versions of GTAV was launched on PS4, PC and Xbox One.
Also I was able to test Red Dead Redemption 2, as well as many other titles that the company ported or updated on other systems during my time at Rockstar Lincoln.
Rockstar North - Content Creator & Level Design Support
After three years at Lincoln, in 2017 I became a content creator at Rockstar North, based in Edinburgh Scotland. Here I worked on DLC pack content for GTAV and eventually Red Dead Redemption Online. After two years or so I was promoted to Level Design Support, developing content in other areas in the games. This involved using the in-house content creation engine, creating or editing online content such as co-op missions, multi-player modes, open world events, race tracks, and other DLC content. When I moved to level design support, I worked more on open world content, designing and implementing events through scripting.
After graduating I took a year to attempt starting up an indie game development group, which lead to the Rocket Shark Studios projects listed below.
However it did not work out and I started looking for my first game development job.
In 2013, I started a compliance and functionality testing job at VMC, where I would do compliance testing for Xbox 360.
I learned the TCR rules to test many triple-A games arriving from many studios, and I would fill in the bug reports if issues were found.
For roughly two weeks I worked at HCL to do test the XBOX One before the release of the console. It was quite the experience where I would often volunteer to work 16 hour shifts.
After a year of this I was able to secure QA Testing work at Rockstar Games.
I previously worked with a project group called Rocket Shark Studios after university. It consisted of four people I managed, and we collaborated on a few projects before disbanding in 2013.
Here we originally worked on a game for the iPad called Late Runner shortly after graduating, where we attempted applying for the Digital City Fellowship scheme to get funding from the university and legitimate ourselves as indies. We were sadly not picked, but we continued till we disbanded in 2013.
Commission Work
We also worked on a few commissioned animations for little companies such as D-Ranged t-shirts. Here we were commissioned to create five animations for their t-shirt characters. I animated the following three animations with my colleague Alec creating all background art.
ZED DEAD
TITAN
HIROKI
Besides that, Myself and Alec Woods were then commissioned to create an animation about LEAN process improvements for a small company.
Due to disagreements with the customer, the project was scrapped towards the end.
For my university final year project, I chose to focus my studies in game UI design. With this in mind, I wanted to achieve creating a full RPG demo in Adobe Flash. This has been a goal of mine for quite some time and I figured that this was the best time to try. The objective was to force me to learn new animation, scripting and art skills by doing such a project.
Ultimately the project was a success, which was a nice demonstration of audio editing, animation, art and writing skills.
You can view the development process on my Production Blog. (Click Here!) Completed Project:
The following links are to the completed SWF interface in parts on deviant art.
Note:
Unforuntently Flash Player since 2020 has been disabled in most browsers.
Please select the link and download the parts on Deviant Art if you wish to view the .SWF file animations.
(If all parts are in the same folder, they should link to each other.)
During my studies at Teesside University on my final year, I participated in a group project with nine fellow students. Unfortunately George Xenitidis left the group towards the start because of personal problems. For this group, I took the role of team manager and I was also the UI designer.
The project consisted of developing a game demo using any game engine. we chosen the Unreal engine and the iPad2 as the platform. Our reasons were that we all had previous experience in UDK thanks to the Journeyman Project and UDK only recently gained the ability to develop for the IOS. In a way we were pioneering a 3D platformer on the recently developer-able UDK platform.
M.C. Escher Painting
Game Concept
One of the team members suggested a third person rotation mechanic game. After some discussion, another team member mentioned an M.C. Escher staircase scenario in a rotating room. These staircases come from all different orientations, so a rotation mechanic would allow you to walk on sideway and upside down stairs.
With this, the team would base the game on trying to get to an exit in each room while navigating through a maze of stairs. This idea was further refined to include all manner of gameplay puzzles such as platforming, dodging deadly obstacles, having to slide a loose object by rotating the level and using interface puzzles to unlock or access areas of the level.
The gameplay would consist of pitfall traps, interface puzzles, rotating the world, trying to slide objects using the rotation and dodging obstacles.
The team decided that the rotation mechanic idea is somewhat original in a 3D space, so it was chosen as the core game mechanic for the game concept.
Finished Product Visuals:
Fuzzy Edge Logo
Splash Screen / Main Menu
Credits Screen
Load Screen
Demo End Screen
HUD
Level Snap-Shots
Characters
Level Demonstration
The video above shows the demonstration of the level developed on the iPad2. This covers the interface and game-play, accompanied by subtitle narration.
Story
The main character awakes in a puddle in dark cubed cargo room. She does not know where she is or how she got there. She only sees a control console and interacts with it. This makes the room rotate and the lights turn on. The room starts to come alive with the sounds of rusted machinery. From here, she is trying to escape these unknown surroundings by reaching each room exit.
As she progresses, she bumps into a small futuristic sentient robot. This robot has mistaken her for a pest and is persistently trying to exterminate her. The robot does not seem threatening at all because it is quite small and has no weapons. It however attempts to sabotage her progression through each room puzzle in the attempt to exterminate her.
The later rooms of the game will reveal that the main character is actually on a spaceship that is storing Earth artefacts. The main character will also learn in a melted ice exhibit, that she was part of the display. This part of the exhibit depicted a 21st century human being found on Mount Everest. Here you realise that the icy prison fell through a large crack in the floor once the ship crashed. This crack lead to the first level and is now clogged by one of the exhibits. Posters littered through the corridors between levels imply that nanobots repaired your frostbitten body.
