Due to the pandemic, Global Game Jam 2021 was held entirely virtually this time around. I would normally make the ~45 minute drive to a local college that hosts one of the largest jam sites in my area to find a group to work with. This time I used, Discord, Google Drive and Perforce to accomplish everything I needed to do and I hope that the people who run GGJ decide to allow a hybrid of in person and remote…
Light Riders was the game that I created for Mini Jam 58: Neon, with a limitation of Money being a core mechanic. I had the pleasure of working with another small team this time around, a Composer and a Programmer. I greatly enjoyed working with the “Neon” theme for this game jam and had a ton of fun building the materials and decals for the level. We also implemented Money as a mechanic (not really a core mechanic in this…
Mini Jam is a smaller game jam organization where they do jams every couple of weeks. They give you the theme about a week before hand and give you a limitation right as the jam begins. For this jam, the theme was Sky and the limitation was “2 randomly chosen words.” The words were “Donut” and “Warzone” which as you can imagine would throw a wrench in most people’s ideas that they may have pre-planned. I had a difficult time…
One of the ways I’ve been keeping myself busy during the pandemic is by building out my home lab and learning what I can about networking and servers. As I started to plan out what I was going to be using this equipment for I searched for gear that was both affordable and easy to setup. I grabbed a used Dell PowerEdge R710 with 128GB of RAM to setup a bunch of VMs on and an incorrectly sized network rack…
This was my first attempt at a game jam using UE4 and the 4th Global Game Jam (GGJ) I participated in. I like to go to UNC Chapel Hill to participate in person for these so I made the trip out there and met up with a composer friend who wanted to do the music for the game. We watched the opening video where GGJ tells everyone what the theme is going to be, it was “repair”. We then tried…
As someone who was began learning in Unity back in 2014/2015 let me tell you that switching game engines isn’t the easiest thing to do. This is especially true when you’re comfortable enough in an engine that you can build just about anything you could imagine. After getting hired at Epic I decided I should probably give up Unity, if not for the sake of my current job then at least because I wanted to focus on UE4 and the…
I got my foot in the door at Epic Games as an Event Technician! I first started back in August of 2018 just as my entire team was headed to PAX West and SIGGRAPH. I helped them load up a few pallets worth of equipment then was left completely alone for the first few weeks of my employment there. It was a bit of a trial by fire where I hadn’t really gotten any sort of training or anything but…
Metal Shell: Neon Pulse (MSNP) was Light Loop Games’s 2nd title and while the game never shipped or got finished I wanted to take the time to tell its story because I learned a lot from attempting to create it. You can download the demo from Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/819460/Metal_Shell_Neon_Pulse/ Originally MSNP started as a game jam game created for Ludum Dare. You can find the playable version of that game here: https://sethrolfe.com/2017/08/03/neon-knights-mech-fighter/https://sethrolfe.com/2017/08/03/neon-knights-mech-fighter/ I worked on this over a weekend with…
I started an indie game development company! I started Light Loop Games (LLG) back in 2018 with the idea that I wanted to continue working on games in an official capacity after college. Also because I found out the hard way that not creating a company and having contracts in place before hiring people or starting to work on something doesn’t always pan out. I met a lawyer who was local to Raleigh, NC and hired him to help me…
This post is being created after the fact… way after but I wanted to circle back and cover the missing sections from my game dev journey so that everything makes sense chronologically. In June 2017 I graduated from Full Sail University as the Valedictorian with a Bachelor of Science degree for Game Design. I also received the Advanced Achievement Award which is: “Given to only one student in each graduating class. The award recognized outstanding achievement throughout the whole program,…
While this isn’t really a game, I did create it in Unity 🙂 I decided to build out a little flash card app that lets users study for the CompTIA Network + certification. Since I’m currently enrolled in a course dedicated to teaching the required topics for the test and I need to study for it I thought this app could help me and others who like to use flash cards. Currently, the app isn’t anything too special but I…