Matt Brenner
Video Game Programmer
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Video Game Programmer
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Projects and Pictures
iOS Photo Hunt HD
So my first iPad game and it's Photo Hunt! I'm getting quite good at making photo hunt, I've worked on 6 different versions of the game for various platforms in the last 3 years. This version of Photo Hunt follows the same gameplay of previous versions. Find the 5 differences before time runs out. However developing the game for iOS using Unity was quite a challenge and reward when I was done. Developing downloadable content has to be one of the most fun pieces of code I've ever written. The game evolved through several iterations on how the content was delivered so it was a good experience for me to be able to have my UI and photo loading logic be generic so that we could find the best solution for delivering the photos to the device. In the end filesize for the packs (200 500x600 .png) was just to large and slow to deliver over the web so we went with an embedded approach and the game has been doing well on the App Store. You can download the full version here and a free version here.
Photo Hunt HD '09
Photo Hunt HD is one of the flagship games that AMI Entertainment has in its lineup of games. My task was to build the game in a brand new engine while keeping every single gameplay feature from the original Photo Hunt. A difficult part of creating this game was an encryption process for the Windows platform. We had to come up with a way to keep the pictures and the data safe. It was a fun task doing it and I learned a lot. Also this was my first encounter with feature creep. 2 weeks before the game was to ship, unknown to myself or the gam
es
spec, there was an additional mode that the game had which I had not planned on when I planed out the code. I had to basically insert a whole new game into an existing one. It was a very good experience for me though because I learned not to box myself in when coding and to be prepared for things like this in the future. This game was made for windows, ported to the Megatouch platform, then remade for the iPhone.
Touchdown Poker
Touchdown Poker is pick'em poker with a slight twist. You can choose to spin your cards to try and get a better hand. This project was a lot of fun to get to work on because of the way I handled deciding what hand the player has and if he beat the AI or not. This game had its own challenges as well. The programmer who started this game left 2 weeks into work on it. So I had to jump right in and hope that I could figure out how everything worked. It was a challenge and I didn't agree to a lot of the ways he did things but it was easier to learn his code than to brute force my own into it.
Funkier Monkey
Funkier Monkey is a simple match game where you make pairs or sequential barrels and score points. This games biggest challenge came at the end of it. My partner and I had both moved onto different games when our testing department came back saying they had a 1-100 play crash. We worked for quite some time trying to track down the bug. It finally came down to an uninitialized variable that indexed an array. I gained some valuable debugging experience because not having a visual debugger and tracking down a bug like this was a pain.
Brain in Gear Critical Thinking
Brain in Gear Critical Thinking was the first game that I worked on at AMI. It is 1 of 3 games that make up the Brain in Gear game. This game was quite the learning process for me. It was my first exposure to the way games are made at AMI as well as being my first time paid to write code. I learned quickly that my ideas are not always the best. I thought that I had come up with an amazing algorithm for placing objects on the scales. One of my co-workers suggested a simple XML template for building scales. I fought for my algorithm only for it to fail. Had I taken the time to plan out and test my ideas before coding I would have seen my failure ahead of time and if I had just kept it simple I may have avoided many problems.
Mario Mixed-Up
Mario Mixed-Up was the first group project that I worked on at Full Sail. The project was a 2 month 2D game which had to follow a guideline for content based on the genre of the game. For MMU I was responsible for the tile engine, level editor, enemy AI, animations, and project scheduling and team meetings. It took the classic Super Mario Brothers to a new level with updated graphics and new abilities such as the FLUDD pack.
-Tile Engine Engine rendering normally
Shown on the right my tile engine both renders the image for the object but also can render the type of collision that each tile is connected to. G for ground, B for brick, C for coin, PBC for a power block when jumped into gives coins, and a PBS which is a power block that contains a super star. The engine it's self is set up to load in from an XML file that my level editor spits out. It only renders the size of the screen to increase the frame count. My engine also handles spawning of enemies and making sure that all of the level resets when the player dies.
Engine rendering with collision data
-Level Editor
My level editor was my first solo experience with the wonderful world of C#. Given only 2 weeks to develop my engine and then port it to work in C# with my editor it was no easy task. But I've found working with .NET is really rewarding when you realize that what you imagine in your head for something to look like is stupid easy to make in C#. My level editor supports creating worlds of any size, saving and loading levels in XML and binary, placing tiles, removing tiles, multiple layers with parallax scrolling, placing enemies, and collision.
Placing tiles into the world
The level editors layout is quite simple with simple switching from placing object tiles into the world to placing collision tiles on top of those and even placing starting points, checkpoints, and ending points of the level. The collision system uses color coded abbreviated blocks to show what type of collision and object you wish to place. You can place in ground, environment, coins, every power-up in the game from fire flowers to the FLUUD pack. You can also place entrances and exits to pipe worlds and vines that Mario can climb up.
Placing collision into the world
-Animations and AI
Doing animations and AI for this project proved to be a daunting task. Our group originally consisted of 4 members but one of the group members decided 3 weeks into the project to take a leave from school and dumped his work onto us. I picked up his two main tasks of Animations and AI. The animation editor that I was handed was broke so I had to spend 5 days fixing that and the engine behind it was wrong so it wasn't very much fun. Me not being a graphics guy either didn't help at all. The enemy AI however was a lot of fun to do. We used a finite state machine so setting up spawning, movement and decision making, and dieing was very simple and fun.
Notice how the koopa on the left is approaching the wall. When he collides with the wall he will change his direction and continue walking.
-Recap
So in the end I'm very proud of MMU and what I have to show from it. I'm very proud of my group pulling together after losing a member and still putting together a solid game. I learned a lot from the process and it really excites me to know that when I get a job at a game company I'll get to do what I did for 2 months every day. The only real downer after the completion of the class was that we couldn't get our installer to work for the game. So we didn't get to show it to our family and friends out of Full Sail until the next break. I have the game for download here so you can give it a shot if you like. You can also download the Level Editor here. The .exe is inside of the folder for both and if you have any problems you can e-mail me. Contact Info
Return of the Living Homeless
Return of the Living Homeless was the first full game that I have ever worked on. We were given 2 weeks to put together a game by ourselves. I choose to make a parody of the South Park episode where the town is infested with homeless people. This is a simple move and shoot game with 3 levels and a boss battle. This game runs on DirectX and basically the entire project was to get our hands dirty and learn to use sound, input, and various other data structures.
-Gameplay
This game is really quite simple to pick up and play. As you can see there are 3 characters to choose from and there are also 3 levels of difficulty. Once you begin the game you can can move anywhere on the screen to avoid the attacking zombies. You can change the direction that you are shooting and move in any direction. There is scrolling so once you reach the middle of the screen you will begin to move across the world.
The other cool aspect of the game was the boss battle. This was my first attempt at doing states for an enemy. Basically when you start out he has a very lax tracking algorithm. As you hit him he gets a darker shade of red and his tracking becomes faster and he becomes more aggressive.
So my first iPad game and it's Photo Hunt! I'm getting quite good at making photo hunt, I've worked on 6 different versions of the game for various platforms in the last 3 years. This version of Photo Hunt follows the same gameplay of previous versions. Find the 5 differences before time runs out. However developing the game for iOS using Unity was quite a challenge and reward when I was done. Developing downloadable content has to be one of the most fun pieces of code I've ever written. The game evolved through several iterations on how the content was delivered so it was a good experience for me to be able to have my UI and photo loading logic be generic so that we could find the best solution for delivering the photos to the device. In the end filesize for the packs (200 500x600 .png) was just to large and slow to deliver over the web so we went with an embedded approach and the game has been doing well on the App Store. You can download the full version here and a free version here.
Photo Hunt HD '09
Photo Hunt HD is one of the flagship games that AMI Entertainment has in its lineup of games. My task was to build the game in a brand new engine while keeping every single gameplay feature from the original Photo Hunt. A difficult part of creating this game was an encryption process for the Windows platform. We had to come up with a way to keep the pictures and the data safe. It was a fun task doing it and I learned a lot. Also this was my first encounter with feature creep. 2 weeks before the game was to ship, unknown to myself or the gam
es spec, there was an additional mode that the game had which I had not planned on when I planed out the code. I had to basically insert a whole new game into an existing one. It was a very good experience for me though because I learned not to box myself in when coding and to be prepared for things like this in the future. This game was made for windows, ported to the Megatouch platform, then remade for the iPhone.
Touchdown Poker
Touchdown Poker is pick'em poker with a slight twist. You can choose to spin your cards to try and get a better hand. This project was a lot of fun to get to work on because of the way I handled deciding what hand the player has and if he beat the AI or not. This game had its own challenges as well. The programmer who started this game left 2 weeks into work on it. So I had to jump right in and hope that I could figure out how everything worked. It was a challenge and I didn't agree to a lot of the ways he did things but it was easier to learn his code than to brute force my own into it.
Funkier Monkey
Funkier Monkey is a simple match game where you make pairs or sequential barrels and score points. This games biggest challenge came at the end of it. My partner and I had both moved onto different games when our testing department came back saying they had a 1-100 play crash. We worked for quite some time trying to track down the bug. It finally came down to an uninitialized variable that indexed an array. I gained some valuable debugging experience because not having a visual debugger and tracking down a bug like this was a pain.Brain in Gear Critical Thinking
Brain in Gear Critical Thinking was the first game that I worked on at AMI. It is 1 of 3 games that make up the Brain in Gear game. This game was quite the learning process for me. It was my first exposure to the way games are made at AMI as well as being my first time paid to write code. I learned quickly that my ideas are not always the best. I thought that I had come up with an amazing algorithm for placing objects on the scales. One of my co-workers suggested a simple XML template for building scales. I fought for my algorithm only for it to fail. Had I taken the time to plan out and test my ideas before coding I would have seen my failure ahead of time and if I had just kept it simple I may have avoided many problems.
Mario Mixed-Up
Mario Mixed-Up was the first group project that I worked on at Full Sail. The project was a 2 month 2D game which had to follow a guideline for content based on the genre of the game. For MMU I was responsible for the tile engine, level editor, enemy AI, animations, and project scheduling and team meetings. It took the classic Super Mario Brothers to a new level with updated graphics and new abilities such as the FLUDD pack.-Tile Engine Engine rendering normally
Shown on the right my tile engine both renders the image for the object but also can render the type of collision that each tile is connected to. G for ground, B for brick, C for coin, PBC for a power block when jumped into gives coins, and a PBS which is a power block that contains a super star. The engine it's self is set up to load in from an XML file that my level editor spits out. It only renders the size of the screen to increase the frame count. My engine also handles spawning of enemies and making sure that all of the level resets when the player dies. Engine rendering with collision data
-Level EditorMy level editor was my first solo experience with the wonderful world of C#. Given only 2 weeks to develop my engine and then port it to work in C# with my editor it was no easy task. But I've found working with .NET is really rewarding when you realize that what you imagine in your head for something to look like is stupid easy to make in C#. My level editor supports creating worlds of any size, saving and loading levels in XML and binary, placing tiles, removing tiles, multiple layers with parallax scrolling, placing enemies, and collision.
Placing tiles into the world
The level editors layout is quite simple with simple switching from placing object tiles into the world to placing collision tiles on top of those and even placing starting points, checkpoints, and ending points of the level. The collision system uses color coded abbreviated blocks to show what type of collision and object you wish to place. You can place in ground, environment, coins, every power-up in the game from fire flowers to the FLUUD pack. You can also place entrances and exits to pipe worlds and vines that Mario can climb up.
Placing collision into the world
-Animations and AI
Doing animations and AI for this project proved to be a daunting task. Our group originally consisted of 4 members but one of the group members decided 3 weeks into the project to take a leave from school and dumped his work onto us. I picked up his two main tasks of Animations and AI. The animation editor that I was handed was broke so I had to spend 5 days fixing that and the engine behind it was wrong so it wasn't very much fun. Me not being a graphics guy either didn't help at all. The enemy AI however was a lot of fun to do. We used a finite state machine so setting up spawning, movement and decision making, and dieing was very simple and fun.
Notice how the koopa on the left is approaching the wall. When he collides with the wall he will change his direction and continue walking.
-Recap
So in the end I'm very proud of MMU and what I have to show from it. I'm very proud of my group pulling together after losing a member and still putting together a solid game. I learned a lot from the process and it really excites me to know that when I get a job at a game company I'll get to do what I did for 2 months every day. The only real downer after the completion of the class was that we couldn't get our installer to work for the game. So we didn't get to show it to our family and friends out of Full Sail until the next break. I have the game for download here so you can give it a shot if you like. You can also download the Level Editor here. The .exe is inside of the folder for both and if you have any problems you can e-mail me. Contact Info
Return of the Living Homeless
Return of the Living Homeless was the first full game that I have ever worked on. We were given 2 weeks to put together a game by ourselves. I choose to make a parody of the South Park episode where the town is infested with homeless people. This is a simple move and shoot game with 3 levels and a boss battle. This game runs on DirectX and basically the entire project was to get our hands dirty and learn to use sound, input, and various other data structures.-Gameplay
This game is really quite simple to pick up and play. As you can see there are 3 characters to choose from and there are also 3 levels of difficulty. Once you begin the game you can can move anywhere on the screen to avoid the attacking zombies. You can change the direction that you are shooting and move in any direction. There is scrolling so once you reach the middle of the screen you will begin to move across the world.
When you get into the game you will see that your bullets do damage to the enemies. As you hit them and take their health, they turn red. The darker shade of red they are, the closer they are to dieing.
The other cool aspect of the game was the boss battle. This was my first attempt at doing states for an enemy. Basically when you start out he has a very lax tracking algorithm. As you hit him he gets a darker shade of red and his tracking becomes faster and he becomes more aggressive.
-Recap
So for my first game I am really proud of what I made. The sounds and input were a real pain but getting all the aspects together made me really proud of what I accomplished. I also see that I've come along way as a programmer. If you are interested in playing it you can download it here. The exe is inside the folder.
So for my first game I am really proud of what I made. The sounds and input were a real pain but getting all the aspects together made me really proud of what I accomplished. I also see that I've come along way as a programmer. If you are interested in playing it you can download it here. The exe is inside the folder.
