I do programming, level design, environment art, sound engineering and other digital art of all kinds, really. But primarily those first three. I started fooling around with basic programming when I was twelve [12], but I wouldn't say I was really any good at it until I was about eightteen [18] or nineteen [19]. It took me about that long to truly understand what it was that I was doing when following the tutorials provided to my by others, and it was around that time that I started to not need them anymore.
Later on, I found that I was able to quickly intuit the way new things I'd never had any prior experiences with worked and operated upon my first encounter with them just by knowing other basic principles. I quickly learned that earning an understanding of those basic principles as building blocks through years of trial and error without really understanding why granted me an immeasurable amount of power when it came to building superior systems from the ground up.
I didn't come back to level design (or environment art) until around 2018–2019 (I had done some rudimentary "mapping" in Source's Hammer editor when I was 12 or 13), but at the time it was only a brief obsession. Upon the release of Half-Life: Alyx I found a new interest in it, and something appeared to click for me that had not in the past. I believe experience and understanding in programming helps a lot with level design, as it allows the designer to make jumps in reasoning that artists would otherwise be unable to. But I also think that there was a lack of tangibility to what exactly it was that clicked for me, to a degree I'll never quite be able to fully grasp.
Unfortunately, most of my work is private or otherwise unsharable, so the list of works below will be short.
I have, however, made a number of minor contributions to other public repositories in the form Pull Requests and Issues. Assuming GitHub's profile page layout hasn't been updated as of my writing, you ought to be able to see a timeline of any public contributions I've made by scrolling down below.
Eagle One • Game Programmer
From about June 2021 to 2022, I was a programmer with Eagle One, a group of developers making content for Half-Life: Alyx and s&box. At the time I was most active in the group, we were working on a symmetrical multiplayer game which still has not been released, where I was responsible for creating several systems pertaining to multiplayer play.
My activity with the group ended when I decided to focus my attention on my schooling.
Source Engine Mapping Teasers
Source Engine Mapping Timelapses
Source 2 Mapping Teasers
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- A binary module for Garry's Mod that provides an intuitive interface for the game's Lua API to interact with the Source engine's visibility-related engine functions (via direct function calls).
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- A classic Garry's Mod map created for the popular gamemode Zombie Survival that I remastered with HDR lighting, new textures (including normal maps and self-shadowed bump maps), new specular lighting, original sound effects, etc., that I all personally made.
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- Second place 🥈 prize-winning submission for the very first Half-Life: Alyx VaultMaps mapping competition.
- At the time this competition began, Half-Life: Alyx's modding tools had only been released for about two weeks, and the competition was scheduled to run for just under a month (June 7th – July 5th, 2020). I had even less time to complete mine as I was leaving on a family vacation about a week and a half before the contest concluded, so I had to hand it off to a friend before it was complete so that he could give the very end of the level the finishing touches that were needed and create an abrupt but passable ending to the level, making it an acceptable submission for the contest.
- My recorded playthrough (early build)
- Another person's recorded plathrough (chance encounter of mine on YouTube)
- If I were to make a similar level nowadays, I would do so much different. The level ended up as it did because of the time constraint and the fact that nobody knew anything about the tools we'd by that point had access to for only two weeks. Following Dirty Deeds, I could and did make much better content, but unfortunately nothing I ever released. For that reason, I may amend these writings with an "Unfinished Works" section.
