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good time to a mind-opening experience with broad appeal."
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About Me
About
Maxwell is a game designer with a heavy tendency towards the technical side of things and a strong drive to learn. He recently finished his final project at the Vancouver Film School Game Design program, where he worked closely with four others to create the game Pulse.
Read more about Pulse here!Read more about Maxwell at his blog.
Portfolio Page
My Projects
Pulse
A first-person suspense survival game in which you play as a blind girl named Eva. Whenever Eva hears a sound, she uses a process similar to echolocation in order to create a mental reconstruction of the world around her. This is visualized for the player on the screen.
See download link below for the game files, screenshots, team resumes, and more.
Responsibilities:
- Worked extensively with C# and Unity3D
- Designed and implemented mechanics and systems
- Created and managed custom shader tech throughout production
- Created custom editor tools in Unity to assist production process
- Designed and implemented AI including A* pathfinding system
Notable Mentions:
The Team:
- Larissa Fuchs - Artist and Project Manager
- Leanne Roed - Scripter and Effects Artist
- Maxwell Hannaman - Programmer
- Michael Cooper - Environment Designer
- Richard Harrison - Level Designer
Download Pulse
Game Files - 1gb | Supporting Materials - 1gb
Fang Shui
Fang Shui is a sidescrolling platformer built in my second term at Vancouver Film School. My team consisted of Larissa Fuchs, who did all of the art, Alex Shannon, who designed the levels and sounds, and myself. I handled all of the programming and asset implementation using Actionscript 3.0.
Fang Shui managed to secure a spot as one of five finalists in the "Best Student Interactive Property" competition for DigiBC's Winter Party in 2011, which gave us the chance to present our game to a panel of judges at Electronic Arts Burnaby.
This project was my first real experience working with a team of people with different skillsets to create a game. The most important lesson I learned while working on this project is that planning is very, very helpful. We managed to get it done on time and within scope, but having everything planned out would have helped immensely. It was a very rewarding experience and everything I learned is now being applied on my final project.
- FINALIST - DigiBC 2011 Best Student Interactive Property Competition
Notable Mentions & Awards:
- Larissa Fuchs - Artist
- Maxwell Hannaman - Programmer
- Alex Shannon - Level Designer
The Team:
You can play the Fang Shui at the link below. Any feedback or comments are greatly appreciated!
Play Fang Shui on Kongregate!
*Requires Flash
Swarm Defense
Swarm Defense started out as an idea for a game, but as I got deeper into the development in XNA, I used it as a chance to explore two topics. The first was XNA in general, and building the beginnings of a Flashpunk-like framework for XNA. The second was to look at swarm intelligence and simple flocking algorithms. The intelligence guiding the swarms has no global manager, it's all controlled on a per-agent basis.
DM - Serenity Tower
Download CTF-SerenityTower
*Requires UDK (rec. v09/11) - 22.1mb
CTF Serenity Tower is a capture-the-flag (CTF) map made in the Unreal Development Kit for my Level Design 2 class at Vancouver Film School. This was a joint project between myself as the level designer and my classmate Michael Cooper as the environmental artist.
The theme we chose for this level was partially inspired by the TV show Firefly, hence the name "Serenity Tower." The idea was that a ship crashed into the side of the tower and now its crew were spilling out to fight with the military entrenched there.
The first thing I did was create some loose designs on paper to to nail down the general shapes, then I took it into UDK to block it out and get a better idea for the feel and scale. After that I went to designing each base and the shared middle area of the map with a 2D layout in Adobe Illustrator.
I then whiteboxed the level, evolving parts of the design as I went to get a more balanced and fun map. We really wanted an asymmetrical map to get across the sense that this really was in a battlefield. Making each base very very different was a challenge to balance, especially because of their vertical positioning. The ship is significantly lower than the military base, so I made it easier to defend and harder to get into, and the military base is harder to to get to, but very difficult to defend and chase from. The balance works pretty well, although I know I could improve it much more given time for tuning.
Placement of weapons and items was difficult for this map, as it is so heavily asymmetrical. Balancing the spawn points, travel times, and weapon placements for each side took a lot of time. I ended up focusing most powerful weapons in the small rooms and offshoots in and around each base, trying to keep the main player paths relatively sparse so that players would have to go out of their way to grab what they needed. In practice it extended average travel distance and allowed teammates to gather up before making an attempt on the flag.
I learned a lot about how working with a teammate to enhance a mutually shared vision can be beneficial for both people. We had a great time working closely to ensure the level design and environmental design matched up to get the feeling and gameplay we wanted across.
You can download the full UDK map below. I suggest running it with UDK version 09-2011; other versions may have issues. We'd love to hear any feedback!
Download CTF-SerenityTower
*Source requires UDK (rec. v09/11) - 22.1mb
Velocity
Download Velocity
Requires UDK (rec. v11/11) - 1.2mb
Velocity is a game prototype made in the Unreal Development Kit for my Level Design 2 class at Vancouver Film School. This project was about making an interesting single player experience as well as implementing and learning UDK's visual scripting language - Kismet. Instead of doing another typical UDK map using the default UDK weapons and gameplay structure, I went a little crazy with kismet and made prototype for a simple run-forever platformer game.
The gameplay of this level revolves around constantly running forward, only able to strafe left, strafe right, and jump. There is an additional mechanic of color shifting between orange and blue. This serves to protect you from lasers scattered throughout your path. If you're blue, blue lasers don't hurt, but orange lasers disentegrate you, and the other way around for orange lasers. These mechanics allowed me to create an increasingly difficult series of challenges for the player, ending with a powerful boss encounter.
I originally wanted to use Unrealscript, but the assignment was specifically kismet only, so I took it as a challenge to see just how far I could get with the idea using kismet. I focused a lot on making the core gameplay fun, having classmates test it, and making sure it was not too brutally difficult. It is intended to be pretty hard, but instant respawns and checkpoints help to keep the pace fast and fun, even if you keep falling off or hitting a laser.
Overall it was a successful prototyping experience and an excellent time learning more about kismet and UDK in general. That said, I'll likely be heading back to Unrealscript for my next prototype.
You can download the full source map below. I recommend using UDK version 11-2011 as it may have issues with other versions. I welcome any feedback, thanks and have fun!