An Elaborate History of Chess

An Elaborate History of Chess is a complex blend of real-time and turn-based strategy. The game mixes farming, survival, crafting, population building, puzzling, boss fights, dungeon crawling, and roguelike mechanics, reimagining the story of the world’s most popular board game through fantasy, documenting, and chess!

As an Iteration Games project, I’m one of the core developers working on An Elaborate History of Chess, contributing around half of the codebase, and all of the art and animations (and a sound effect or two!).

Some of my most notable contributions are the game’s pathfinding and movement system (allowing for variable and complex movement patterns); an event-driven objective and tutorial system (built to be extensible as we add new objective types); the game’s save system (which serialises and deserialises the entire game state using JSON files as required); the procedural generation system for the open world (including a biome system) and dungeons (with both layout and puzzle generation, including procedural generation of checkmate puzzles!); a custom editor for dungeon layouts for when we want to create a hand-crafted experience; and an entity-component system for unit abilities (allowing for deeply customisable player units).

Working on this game has taught me a lot, and I’m really excited to see it out in the world!

Paper Pirates

Paper Pirates is a social deduction game for 1-10 players, released in 2020 by Iteration Games, for PC, Mac and Linux. The game is designed to be played using phones or tablets as the players’ controllers, with the main game taking place on a shared screen or livestream.

Allowing players to use phones as controllers allows for some interesting mechanics built around private information. This required a custom system architecture, with a Unity game, server, and web client (tailored to mobile devices) working in tandem.

My role on Paper Pirates was lead front-end developer, producing art, animations, and the majority of the original codebase for the Unity front-end, using WebSockets for real-time communication with the game’s Node.js server.

In the years since Paper Pirate’s release, we have provided multiple free updates, with both cosmetic and mechanical changes and additional content across seasonal events and new game modes. The codebase has grown substantially in this time, providing us with hands-on experience supporting a live-service project, optimising and adapting system design to meet evolving game requirements.

Colour Rush

Colour Rush is a four player networked multiplayer game developed as part of my PhD. The game is used as a testbed for research into emotional response in multiplayer games, collecting self-report data, telemetry, and video feeds from both the game and the players’ webcams.

Data collected from Colour Rush has been the focus of multiple academic publications, including investigation into the effect of common game modes on the utility of the collected data.

The game was developed in the Unity game engine, and uses Photon for network functionality and the Evereal plugin for video capture. Telemetry data is captured using a custom event logging system built for light-weight but detailed capture of in-game behaviour.

PocketMen

PocketMen is a collection game about finding the “happy place” for tiny people living in your home. It’s also a game about kitting out said home by creating a trading card game using pictures of the tiny people living there, using the cards you make to tame more of them, and selling ultra rare holofoil cards for even more money.

PocketMen was developed over the course of 48 hours for Ludum Dare 56. The game came 15th overall in the competition, and attained 1st place for both Theme and Innovation.

The game was developed in 48 hours in the Unity game engine, and makes use of an event driven system to handle the early-game tutorial.

Blood Magic

Blood Magic is a deckbuilding game where you create your own cards through ritualistic summoning!

The game was made in Unity over the course of a week-long game jam, and features user-generated content (saving and loading images), an elemental buff and debuff stacking system, and a data-oriented approach to handling the player’s deck of cards, decoupling card stats and user-generated content from in-world game objects.

Tethered

Tethered is a simple spatial puzzle game for 2-10 players. The game requires players to traverse the exterior of a space station, collecting remotes and using them to reboot terminals following collision with an asteroid impact.

There’s just one problem, tethers and oxygen are in short supply! Players must therefore exit the exterior hatch and coordinate their movements, repairing terminals quickly before getting back aboard.

Tethered was developed in the Unity game engine as part of a week-long game jam, with distance-based movement constraints across a variable number of players (all sharing a single keyboard!) making for a simple yet fun challenge.

Good Cheese Isn’t It?

Good Cheese Isn’t It? is a lactose intolerant stealth game where the player must make their way through as many bottles of wine at a wine and cheese party as possible. Roaming NPCs will keep a careful eye on the player however, and if they spot them not trying any of the delicious cheeses (or going so far as to hide said cheese in a plant pot!), they’ll be sure to kick them out of the party.

This game gave me a fun reason to test out some 2D pathfinding and line of sight-based mechanics, alongside a finite state machine for NPC behaviour.