What am I Doing Now?
Game design has been my entire life since starting university, and I simply cannot stop working on my passion, as may be self-evident by my portfolio.
So in the time between looking for a job, I have three major ongoing projects, and a few side-projects.
Four Days in Sheifsford
The biggest of these projects is a game called “Four Days in Shiefsford”. For this project, I really wanted to go outside of my usual limits; almost every game I’d developed had been made in a modern game engine. I wanted to go back to basics and make something for the PS1.
Homebrewing is no new thing, but homebrewing for a retro 3D console has proven to be an incredible challenge so far. I wanted to make it for PS1 partly due to nostalgia (as my website design may indicate) and partly because I believe that working within limitations encourages creativity, which is exactly what it’s done for me so far.
The PS1 is just fed in pure C script, so making anything complex like Big Bad Friend would be extremely difficult, on top of the added limitation of hardware restrictions. So, I’m using some very simple code to create a day-night system and a simple quest system to create something resembling a video game version of Groundhog’s Day.
I’ll be making a small village full of quest-givers who, over the course of four days, will have their quests progress in simple ways over the course of four days. This shouldn’t prove to be too complex to make, but I feel that the mileage I can get out of this basic system will make something quite special. Pictured right is a little diagram roughly laying out what some of the NPCs will be doing at certain times of each day.
So far, I’ve begun experimenting with a day and night system as well as going through the arduous process of getting a 3D model into the game. It’s been tremendous fun so far, and I can’t wait to start burning it down to a CD and having it play on some ancient hardware.
Oceania Expanded (Europa Universalis 4 Mod)
On top of this, I’m still into modding games so I’m making a Polynesia mod for the renaissance-era strategy game Europa Universalis 4. For this mod I’ll be adding extra provinces to the game, as well as more religions and cultures to tie into EU4’s existing systems.
What I have for this project so far is some new countries in Hawaii, as well as new religions and cultures, and a united Hawaiian nation that players can form. Ultimately, I want to fill the Pacific with new countries, and add my own 3D models for their soldiers, as well as implement a unique “Mission Tree” for my new nations (a system very similar to the “Focus Tree” in my Ryukyu mod for Hearts of Iron 4).
I want to see how well I can emulate the experience that Polynesian civilizations had to go through throughout history using EU4’s mechanics, and give players lots of open options for how they want the destiny of their oceanic nations to go. Maybe they want to recreate the explorer spirit of the Polynesians and travel all around the world, or perhaps they’re more interested in making like Kamehameha and uniting their people under a single empire and embracing the Polynesian ways of colonialism. In any case, I want the player experience to feel meaningful and maybe teach the player something about these criminally underrepresented cultures.
Millennium Dawn (Hearts of Iron 4 Modding)
I’m also aiding development on Millennium Dawn, the most popular mod for Hearts of Iron 4. Millennium Dawn brings Hearts of Iron into the modern day and introduces modern gameplay mechanics into the game such as foreign investments and political espionage. Pictured left is the response I got from one of the lead developers when I applied, stating that they were considering me for a leadership position once I'd been around long enough.
I’m in charge of developing the United Kingdom for Millennium Dawn, and a lot of what I’m trying to do with it is build on what I did with The Three Mountains, and then some. The angle I’ve approached this focus tree from is very personality-based, as I feel that’s much more suitable for the modern British political climate. Big personalities like Tony Blaire, Nigel Farage, and Jeremy Corbyn I feel should be reflected in the mechanics in the game, alongside the ideologies of their parties and supporters. So, each leader has their own dedicated set of focuses, to represent their policies and beliefs. Pictured right is my current focus tree plan.
A challenge that this has that Ryukyu didn’t is that modern politics is a contentious subject, and representing modern figures is potentially very controversial. So what I’ve tried to do is to allow the various options for each potential democratic leader to be either negative or positive, and allowing the player themselves to project their opinions about that political figure into the game. I attempt to represent each leader’s political views neutrally, and leave it to the player to decide what to make of it, casting aside my own beliefs and biases.