Games
Dimension Tension
Dimension Tension is a PC local multiplayer game, where players are trapped in separate dimension due to a failed hyperspace jump. Players mush try to align their spaceships and everything in them so that they can re-combine into reality! Get it on itch.io
Fortegarde
Fortegarde is a tower defence strategy game with playing cards. Defend your fortress while attacking the enemy fortress. Play it on itch.io
Make It Light!
Make It Light! is a simple game about fighting off enemies in waves and trying to light up the map to stop them spawning! Play it on itch.io
Skewer It!
Skewer It! is an android game about collecting food on a skewer in space, while continously speeding up as the game progresses! Build your bonuses and beat your highscore! It is free and has no ads, get it here: Skewer It! on Google Play Store or read the source code here: Skewer It! on Github.
Portfolio
September 2024.
Fortegarde is my entry for my second game jam, the Godot Wild Jam #73! A tower defence strategy game using wildcards from past game jams as playing cards. Updated after the jam with an all new free online multi-player mode hosted on a cloudflare worker with a D1 SQL database, a rewritten enemy AI for single-player mode, a tutorial mode, and UI upgrades. Play it on itch.io.
August 2024.
I joined my first game jam! The Godot Wild Jam #72. I started a little late so this game was made in under a week. The theme was light and dark, so I gave the player the goal of lighting up the map to prevent enemies from spawning, however in order to achieve this the player must fight the enemies to obtain torches, so most of the gameplay revolves around fighting. Play it on itch.io
Spring to Summer 2024.
Dimension Tension is a game I came up with the innitial idea for and made most of the assets for, with a small group for university. After the term was over I wrote all the game logic in Godot Engine. It is a local multiplayer game where each player's map is slightly different, and they have to work together to make them the same in order to win. Get it on itch.io.
December 2023 - March 2024.
I worked with Jason & Becky on an interactive theatre production for display at the Opening Doors Festival in Aberystwyth. Based around the script provided by Jason & Becky I designed and created character customization menus, 3 unique 3D environments, 3 types of puzzles, 2 types of enemies, a health system, collectables, and a stats screen for when the game is over. Using Blender 3D for modeling, Adobe Substance Painter for textures, and Godot game engine.
2023, Winter.
An animated mock game ad I made for university. I initially wanted to use motion capture, however, the suit provided by the university wasn't working correctly. I ended up manually rotoscoping this animation in Blender based on a video of myself, in the last couple of weeks before the deadline. The character assets are based on 3D scans of myself. The effects are added in Adobe After Effects.
2023, Autumn / Winter.
Fortnite assets made for a university assignment. I had to create a logo for the first half of the module, and for the second I had to place that logo on 3 assets in Fortnite. The assets had to fit the art style of the game, however the logo itself didn't.
2023, Summer.
Skewer It! is a mobile game I made in Godot Engine. It features a 3D environment, a custom UI, custom GLSL shaders, and custom logic, written in gdscript. It is based on catching food items on a skewer. The game is simple to play, but requires the player to remember what they have picked up, as picking up the same thing twice is not allowed. The game stores a high score, and the player will get a bonus based on the time since their last mistake. Too many mistakes and the player will fail. Source code available on Github.
2023, Summer.
This is an assortment of 3D models I made for a simulated forensic investigation of the 2020 Beirut explosion which my university ran over the summer in collaboration with Brimstone Consultancy. I worked in a small group of 1st and 2nd year students where my role was 3D modeling. More models were made by others in the group, and the result was compiled into Unreal Engine.
2023, April.
This is a simple looping animation I made for a university assignment. I chose to animate a walking cycle because I feel like its quite a common requirement. I also wanted to portray some emotion/action in the scene, hence the falling boxes. I used an example asset from the Maya asset store for the character, however I modeled the background and rigged and animated the character myself.
2023, February to April.
Here is a 3D diorama I made for a university assignment. The focus of the assignment was on environment design, but all assets were modeled, UV unwrapped and textured by myself. This diorama is intended to look inviting/relatable but also to provoke questioning - who lives here and what is their life like? - thus I gave it the title of "HOME?"
About Me
This is my journey through the games design world:
From a young age I have been making 3D models out of folded paper, and even drawing textures on them. I have also been good at sketching with graphite pencil for many years.
I've always been fascinated by colours, however I was never able to create satisfying drawings in colour on paper. Recently I have been starting over with colour drawings on my digital tablet, and am much more satisfied with the outcome.
When I was age five I wanted to be a glass blower, because of the way light plays through transparent objects. For a long time amethyst was my favorite stone, because I loved the transparent purple. As I grew older it changed to opal, which in my opinion is even more beautiful than diamonds. Now I find similar satisfaction in rendering 3D worlds on the computer and writing my own shaders to create different virtual light effects.
When I was age fourteen I played my first proper computer game. It was a Quake 3 Arena demo, with only a couple of maps, which I found on the back of an office CD in my dad's collection. I didn't have a computer of my own at the time but I sneakily installed it on my dad's Windows 8 laptop, and was immediately fascinated.
Shortly after this I found I could connect to the internet from his laptop too, and installed a few random games distributed by WildTangent, which was pre-installed on his laptop. This introduced me to racing games, like Final Drive Fury, simulation games like Euro Truck Simulator, and story adventure games like Agapan.
Just weeks later I was already diving into the very basics of game design (okay, I guess I'm hyping this up) by copying Agapan's soundtrack files and renaming them to replace the soundtrack in Final Drive Fury.
After I found that this worked, and that Final Drive Fury's files were accessible, I replaced the textures on the in-game advertisement banners with images I drew to advertise my own fictitious companies.
When I was sixteen I got my first proper laptop, and digital camera, and dived head first into photo editing in GIMP. Shortly after this, I installed Blender.
At the time, Blender came with a game engine built in. Over the next year I made many games for me and my brother to play. Starting with simple racing games, using the built in physics engine and making simple models, all solid colours. I moved on to make Star Wars inspired flying games, even modeling an X-Wing and textured the landscape and some of the models.
The Blender Game Engine (BGE) offered both visual logic nodes and Python scripting. As I made more complex games I moved away from the visual logic to Python, which I self-taught from online tutorials. I was able to make split-screen multiplayer games which provided hours of laughter with my brother.
I started adding scoring systems to these games, first using the built in debug system to display values in the corner of the screen, and eventually moving on to overlaying 2D scenes on the 3D world and changing models and textures to display health and such.
When I was eighteen I learnt Java from a book, and went on to learn C and C++ online, along with HTML, CSS, and PHP. As I started experimenting with C I wasn't satisfied with making empty win32 windows, and decided to learn GLSL and create an OpenGL program.
My first OpenGL programs were simple psychedelic screensavers, where polygons would circle in or out from the center of the screen, rapidly cycling through the rainbow. Some time later I made a Flappy Birds inspired side-scrolling game where a glowing orb of light had to dodge other glowing orbs flying past it.
My last programming based project was a Minecraft mod, which adds maple trees, with vibrant gold and burgundy leaves, biomes, and items including all the associated wood and planks and steps etc., maple syrup, and crafting recipes. This was of course written in Java and Json/XML, for Minecraft version 1.16. I updated the mod for 1.17 and 1.18, but didn't include the biomes because of large changes in these versions of the game. I haven't updated it since, but still plan on revisiting that project sometime.
When I was twenty-one, I was accepted into the BA Computer Games Design course at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. Since starting I have kept a record of my projects, originally on Behance.net, which I have now moved to this portfolio website, and on my Instagram.
Contact
You can email me at [email protected] or find me on Instagram @mikedawe42.