Old Timers, the culmination of the mini3T experiments, was a labour of love that I regrettably decided to shelve in June of 2019.

Over the project I split myself between development, design and even marketing, and learnt a lot more about making games and our industry in the process.

I imagine I will return to these ideas, and perhaps even the tech I built, at some point in the future, but for now my trip down the time-travel rabbit hole is on hiatus.

A full post-mortem is forthcoming…

Another commission, this slot machine was designed to be highly portable (used on various Android devices across many different regions) and customisable. An extensive backend allowed fine tuning of all the machine’s mechanics, and data was both stored and sent to the cloud for aggregation.

Beneficiary of the UK Games Fund Round 4, this project required an interaction system that allowed behaviours to be defined in editor and state to be entirely serializeable. We worked around various Unity shortcomings to allow this.

mini3T is the codename for a series of prototypes built exploring different methods of depiciting time-travel in a video game. The project came out of a conversation a couple of years ago about the film Looper. Hollywood movies can ‘fudge’ their time-travel quite easily, whereas games are usually stuck with time-manipulation (marginalising actual time-travel to a theme or plot device). This project is an attempt to make a time-travel game where you actually feel like a time traveller.

From these prototypes came the split-screen time-travel idea of Old Timers.

A commission for Quadrotech, Radar uses the company iconography in a game that can be easily grasped and provides fast, fun rivalries between show attendees. It also provided a platform for receiving attendee details and starting new business relationships.

I joined Arena Gods at first to help refactor the code to be network-ready. This soon became a large task that involved rewriting many features and implementing news ones.

We were a small but dispersed team spread across three different continents, but managed to use modern work paradigms to keep co-ordinated and prevent project blocks.

Working with Plug-In Media in Brighton, I was brought on at the end of the project’s life-cycle, dealing with bug fixes, additional feature requests and general feedback from the client.

The app was interesting in that it was controlled via a Bluetooth static bicycle, with pedals to control momentum and handle-bars for direction.

Working up in the North of England at Coatsink was a great experience, and quite the counterpoint to my time in China. The team and I had the pleasure of bringing Gang Beasts online, and allowing players to get closer to the action than ever before with VR integration.

Synctory is a great tool for writing scripts for theatre, but its real power is in the potential it was for integration with other systems. The Synctory Library for Unity is the next part in a system to streamline the production of multi-threaded narrative experiences.

The library currently features the ability to import scripts, to view those scripts in a real-time script viewer, and a binding system that allows various elements to react to changes in the script over time.

The product of a self-organised, farewell-Beijing jam for Sam Green, Tobias Baumann, Dan Arnold-Mist and myself, the game takes mechanics from Beepee, applies a local-multiplayer mindset, dresses it in the grotesque and puts a bold pun on top.

Although the project itself was abandoned due to the practicalities of global separation, much of the technical work informed patterns in the Ent2D framework, and flying mechanic is something I’ll want to use in the near future.

The Ember Conflict was the two year project of Substantial Games, my home in Beijing. Our CTO YJ Park changed the way I thought about coding, being something like a tech version of Shigeru Miyamoto; if ever you are settled into thinking one idea is best, Park could be relied on to show you how many things you hadn’t considered.

People were constantly impressed with how great our game looked; testament to the skill of Daniel Arnold-Mist and his team (artist Diego Candia and animator Kenneth Greenblatt) as well as Pin Wang’s modern UI designs. Although we gained many hardcore fans we did not achieve the traction necessary for ‘escape velocity’ and went our separate ways in 2015. Having now moved back to Europe I have been picketing everyone to move West ever since.

Live games are to video games as theatre is to film; it only lasts for a finite time with a finite audience but hell is it electrifying.

I used my birthday to galvanise friends to form teams and participate in a day of drinking, running and strategy, and for me worrying the wheels might come off at any point. Fortunately Meteor proved a stable and flexible platform to build the game on, with no hiccups as teams ran riot over the hutongs of Beijing using mobile devices to check in. There were some superb plays over the two and a half hour play session and the winning team got to choose my new haircut: an inverse mohawk.

If you would like to run your own version of the game, or are interested in helping develop the platform please get in touch!

Probably my favourite project so far, Delicate Thread was my collaboration with artist Kat Trautmann and featured voice talent from James Laver, Warisa Neranartkomol and Chris Wegoda.

Made for JamForLeelah, it builds on some of the ideas from Alex Takes a Test and commits fully to a story of a child coming to terms with their identity. Working with Kat was an absolute pleasure; due to our opposite timezones I would usually wake to some awesome thing Kat had made that would fill my day with motivation. Our collaborations on the scripts, drawing on our own histories, made the game very personal and filled the narrative with a charge.

Thankfully, unlike Alex Takes a Test the experiment was a success. The infinite runner mechanics merged with the narrative and sound design to create an emotion thrill-ride that manages to convey the internal without patronising or lecturing.

Synctory is a script-writing tool designed to make writing multi-threaded narratives as painless as possible.

Multi-threaded narratives require the viewer to have some choice in which things they observe. Things are happening simultaneously; to watch one storyline is to miss out on the other. This allows the artist great opportunities to play with perspective, pacing and social dimensions.

Synctory’s output is something that looks very much like a screenplay. This can be used for the creation of immersive plays, interactive films or narrative-based video games. It can also be imported into the Unity game engine via the Unity Synctory Library.

A small javascript library built on top of THREE.js to flatten any mesh into a 2D plane. This was a core component of the Kammy Chair Builder webapp, open-sourced as I thought it might be of some use to others.

A collaborative experiment with People’s Industrial Design Office, the app allowed users to design their own chair by editing the shape of a 2D plane, which is then folded origami-style into a chair. The technical challenges of the project were significant, but as we wanted to roadtest it at the Get It Louder exhibition we took shortcuts, using polygonal meshes (rather than meshes) and approximating the folding of the mesh from 2D to 3D.

My final project at Imperial, Lucura was an experiment in rethinking the way games in education can work. It used crowd-sourcing to create content, and split the curation between teachers and students to incentivise educational and fun games.

Each game was constructed as a series of micro-games, invigorating a quiz format that could also test aptitude. These limitations allowed the game making tools to be greatly simplified.

My first fully fledged ‘game’, this was a passion project over many months. Inspired by Jonathan Blow’s Braid I wanted to create a similar allegory using traditional 2D platform game mechanics. I also wanted to have a working ecosystem, and although I technically achieved both these things I’d be the first to note neither was remotely ‘juiced’, nor really squeezed at all.

The game is packed with ideas that hint at a grander meaning, although I failed to make anything less trite than a secret win condition implying that the use of oil in the game is mostly unnecessary (it is, of course, a reference to the Deepwater Horizon spill of 2010).

Nevertheless the core flying mechanic (which slowly unlocks over a half hour playtime) was interesting enough to spawn an entirely different experience; the current W.I.P ‘Cockateers’.