I've made a few games in my life, but these two are my favorites, mostly for what they represent. Mediocre Squirrel Man and Cuddly Crusader were made during an Honors Game Design course I helped pioneer while I was in college. (There was no Game Design program at my college before I attended, but after a few demos I led for various student groups such as ACM, interest in Game Design grew, and the department eventually added some courses relevant to the field. Now, you can minor in Game Design.) I have a small collection of some of the assignments we did, such as making procedurally generate terrain, skyboxes, and shading our own custom 3D objects.

Mediocre Squirrel Man levels are all laid out in a text file, and that file is fed into the game engine (Unity) to then render the level. Because of this, it is very easy to add new levels - just write a text file and add it to the project. Every once in awhile I open this project back up again and do some updates. I actually recently just went in and remastered some of the artwork to tile a little better, and I rewrote a few levels to make them more interesting to play. Your goal is simply to go from one side of the screen to the other, dodging owls and grabbing any acorns you can. Acorns will increase your score (which slowly dwindles away as time ticks on) and owls will cause you to restart the level. Touch the last acorn in the level to be transported to the next stage! I hope to have Mediocre Squirrel Man playable on this website again soon - Unity made some changes to their player that doesn't play nice with my website.

Cuddly Crusader was the very first fully-functional game I ever made completely from scratch, completely by myself. Originally I had a teammate for it, but they dropped the class before we even got started on the project. I decided to just go it alone and have full control over the game rather than join a team, just because it was my very first experience and I wanted to do everything so that I could learn it all. I made the creepiest bears on earth for the game, and added some fun lighting and particle effects just to see what sort of stuff I could do. The goal in this game is simply to guide the ball around the maze and run into the bears. This will cause the bears to disappear, and you'll get a point for each one. There's some replay value here since you can try and beat your old scores and optimize your route. Most unfortunately, the game files for Cuddly Crusader have been lost to time, so all that survives is this single screenshot.