JADEN SCHNEIDER'S PORTFOLIO

Wobble Warriors was my game design and development capstone game. It was based on an idea that I pitched, so my title throughout the process was "Product Owner". I was responsible for programming the unique character systems, which are based on games like Gang Beasts and Human Fall Flat. This type of system allows characters to replicate animations through physical movements, making them feel like part of the world. This system is referred to as "active ragdoll", and was a very interesting problem to tackle for my final college game. Wobble Warriors was written in C# using the Unity Engine.

Flowku was a side project that I worked on with my roommate, Ryan Hornberger. He did a lot of the design work and level design while I did most of the implementation. For this project, I worked hard to make my code very modular so that levels were easy to set up. In Flowku, the player must assign numbers to a grid while following a set of conditions. Some grid spaces must be even, odd, equal to another space, greater than another space, etc. Flowku was written in C# using the Unity Engine.

This project was inspired by VR games like Boneworks or The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners. In these games, the player is given artificial body features so that they can better interact with the world and become more immersed. In this program, I used the controllers' and headset's positions and rotations to estimate where the player's other body parts were. This virtual body was also given the ability to take steps and adjust its footing in the virtual world, thanks to the inverse kinematics implementation. The VR application took advantage of the Steam VR interface and was programmed in C# using the Unity Game Engine.

Inspired by a video by Sebastian Lague and studies by Craig Reynolds, I developed a working flocking simulation. Each boid follows three simple rules: separation, alignment, and cohesion. The boids must stay apart as to not crash into each other, they must steer to go the same direction as other boids, and they must steer towards the center point of the closest boids. On top of these three rules, I gave boids the ability to detect walls and other obstacles. This was written in C# using the Unity Engine.

To exercise my C++ programming skills, I created Caps Block. Caps block is a program that will prevent the user from accidentally hitting the caps lock button. The user can still toggle caps lock, but a much more deliberate action (hitting the key 5 times) is required.

This was the first team programming project that I had worked on. The team had three programmers (including myself) and two artists. We were tasked with creating a game for an android tablet. We made a game where the player must avoid the monsters in their nightmares, manage their stress, and survive until the morning. Eldritch Nights was developed using C# in the Unity Engine.