PixelJunk Racers (PS3/PSN) 2007

Working with Rhod and Dylan, I made an HD 2D casual action game for PSN.  I tried to create something halfway between a slot car simulation and Bomberman.

BOOM BLOX (aka PQRS) (Wii) 2006

Doug asked me to kick off a new Wii title, so how could I resist?  I did some basic R&D with the controller, then a bunch of physics-based gameplay mechanics prototyping.  Working with Lou and Jeff, we managed to cover a lot of design territory very quickly – I think rapid prototyping is quite difficult to get right, but can be very satisfying.

Indie Game Jam 4 (PC) 2006

Because I was experimenting with music games, I volunteered to write the code base for IGJ - a low level, toolkit-y audio library.  The jam occurred over thanksgiving at Chris's house, making it more intimate than previous ones.  

My game was was inspired by previews I read for REZ.  Ie, I imagined it was something like this...  I wanted a game where the music, level, and gameplay all encourage (but not force) the player to use the controller in a visceral way that *feels* good.

While I don't think this turned out to be a very good "game" (mostly due to stupidly picking rather orthogonal mechanics), as a prototype I'm happy with it - it roughly achieved the feel I wanted.

Happycake/Breach (Cell) 2004-2005

Jon and I created a prototype of a Cell-server physics-based action game.  The basic setup was that the player defends a city from attacking robots (including some truly giant ones).  

I wrote an SPU-optimized semi-implicit integrator that used forced decoupling to fit workloads into the local store.  The collision system used a union of convex hulls, and allowed dynamic shattering to very cool destructive effect.   

Creating self-locomoting creatures was actually pretty fun – we spent a lot of time on the low-level motion control and not much on the high-level AI, so they were like the robots of early SF: strong and stupid.  The best part was blowing off their legs and watching them fall - you could do it 100 times and it would never get old.

During the project, Jon and I took a weekend to experiment with programmer-generated cities .