Nancy’s Games Portfolio
I love experimental gameplay. It’s exciting. It’s risky. It’s new and different. As an experimental gameplay programmer there’s nothing I love more than to create a new experience. Here’s a few of my favorite projects!
Schrodinger’s Uncertain Butterfly: A Principle in Perception
Praise for this game:
“OMG this game rulezzz!”
–Roger Altizer Ph.d. (Associate Director EAE University of Utah)
Tools used: Unity, C#, SVN
Platform: PC
Controls: Use the mouse for the menus. Then discover a different way to move with the same WASD
FREE download: Uncertain Butterfly
The More Betterflies team: Nancy Newren (team lead, gameplay engineer, design, original concept), Shane Sumsion (artist), and Swapnil Sawant (engineer), Casey Deans (producer). More Betterflies is on Facebook. We’d love to hear what you think!
Armadillo Smash N’ Roll
Armie has been a “lab rat” — nearly nothing to compares to that insult! — to aliens for far too long. But what the aliens haven’t realized is that they’ve trained and taught him, possibly enough for Armie to make a daring, and fun, escape! Help him smash n’ roll his way to freedom in this fun experimental mobile game for windows 8!
This game won Editor’s Pick Award, 2013
My contribution: UI/UX, platform build and publishing engineer, ideation
Tools used: Unity, C#, SVN
Platform: Windows 8
Controls: Touch the direction on the circle to roll armie up and manuever your way to freedom!
Free on the Windows store: Armadillo Smash N’ Roll!
Team: Gagan Singh (engineer), Nancy Newren (engineer), Robert Guest (artist), Casey Deans (producer), Brad Dedea (producer). Soon after this fun little project, and before we could refine our level designs, our small team moved on to bigger and better things, but we’re on Facebook!
Modding an 80’s Arcade Game
Test your gamer skills against this difficult arcade game! Remember it only counts as winning if you carry the plumber with you to the little blue “door” at the bottom. You’re wearing heals so you can’t jump on/off ladders, and carrying him really slows you down, but you can’t leave him behind! Jump over the barrels or, in a pinch, throw him at a barrel to avoid getting hit yourself. He’s a man. He can take it! At least a couple times…
Just for promoting girl power I had to include this fun little game we made in ActionScript. The assignment was to take an 80’s arcade game and riff off of it. We decided to base our game off the arcade game where a certain pumbler goes against a certain giant monkey; only this time the woman gets to be the hero! That poor, tall plumber dressed in green did everything but stay concious after defeating that monkey. Now this strong woman has to carry his heavy self out of the building and all the while jumping over and dodging barrels, in a dress and high heels no less! Her date just had to end badly…
Tools used: ActionScript, git
Play now for free on the web!
Is This A Match? No!
Use your well devloped little brain to match the 3D objects to their photographs. You’ll get fun feedback when you make a match!
I made this game in a week with nothing but a graphics engine and rudimentary game loop (for submitting the graphics assets every frame of course!). Okay, so it’s not pretty, but sometimes you just need to get to proof of concept; beautifying the game can come later.
This game is not pretty, but it was fun to make and to present to my class. And it was one of only two-three unique games made out of a class of 30.
Praise for this game:
“Thanks for taking the time to discuss your project so thoroughly, and also for spending so much time making a cool game. I was impressed!”
— John-Paul (Professor for EAE 6310:Game Engineneering II, real-time graphics engineer, and game engineer on the Infinity Disney games.)
My contribution: SOLE developer
Tools used: C++, D3D, OpenGL
Free Download: Fun Shape Matching Game!
Development Blog: I kept a weekly record of the devleopment of the game engine leading up to and creating this game. Read all about it here.
