Michael Zyskind

Wild Runner - The Quickening

Built in the Unity game engine using Visual Studio Community and C#. This game features procedural level generation allowing for endless gameplay by constantly placing new randomly selected segments and removing old segments. Up to 2 players can play side-by-side in either competitive or non-competitive splitscreen gamemodes.

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Wild Quests - the Trials

Built in the Unity game engine using Visual Studio Community and C#. In this game the player explores a procedurally generated dungeon. The level, or dungeon, grows as the player explores more areas; randomly selecting what room to add next. One limitation of the Unity engine is that navmeshes are prebaked, or static. This means they won't be able to adapt to the level as it grows and enemies won't be able to move to or within new rooms. I solved this by regenerating navmeshes whenever a new room is added.

This was made for the Transformed Titles Jam, the goal of which was to design any part of the game with a neural network. I used a neural network to generate the title of the game and then used that title as the premise to build the game around. The full name being: It's all still unclear how much time it will take the player to complete one of the 24 quests

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Wild Fighter

Built in the Unity game engine using Visual Studio Community and C#. In this game the player races against the clock to collect all the stars. Because of the procedural level generation, one of the main challenges was ensuring that the player has a path to all of the objectives. Because of a limitation with how Unity handles recursion, I had to implement the path finding algorithm asynchronously. Which led to its own challenges surrounding managing all the various threads that are concurrently searching the maze for a navigable path from point A to B.

This was made for Bullet Hell Game Jam #1, the goal of which was to make a bullet hell game. There weren't many constraints aside from the theme, which was time. Hence, why the player has a limited amount of time to collect all the stars.

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Cavalcade

For a college course on object oriented design principles I designed and built my own version of Caravan in Java following various object oriented design principles. While I tried to remain authentic to the original game, I changed some of the rules to make the game easier to understand. One of the biggest challenges was building a bot so that the player can play against the computer. I spent a few weeks writing and optimizing logic that allows for the bot to play the game intelligently. I've continued to work on this game, making various improvements to gameplay and other changes including swapping the Swing graphics library for JavaFX.

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Heroes, Kaisers, Submarines

For a college course on game design I collaborated with a group to design a complex card. This game was intended to teach basic cooking by helping players understand the relationship between various ingredients. Using the Unity game engine and C#, I turned the physical game into a video game with online multiplayer. The biggest challenge was coding the competitive online multiplayer functionality. I had to ensure that each client was syncrhonized, without giving away information about the cards in any player's hand. I also designed the cards for the digital game to be loaded dynamically through XML documents to make it easier to edit the cards stats. The artwork was made by a teammate named Joe. Unfortunately, due to time constraints and the fact that we were only required to create and design a physical game, the digital game is not complete.

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Frog Hopper

For my senior year capstone project, I collaborated among a 6 person team to design and build a search engine for job applications. It aggregates listings from sites like Indeed and allows our own users to search, filter, and save jobs that interest them. We also built features like graphing and user profiles. This was written in Python, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS using Jupyter Notebook. Flask and Jade was used to make the web application and templates for various pages and menus. My role within the group was to use Flask and Jade to build the archictecture needed for the web application and to design the web pages.

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Wild Dungeons

Built in the Unity game engine using Visual Studio Community and C#. Like Wild Quests this game is also a procedurally generated dungeon crawler. Where the games differ is that I've expanded a lot of the features for this game. Combat now takes into account factors like armor and the characters own strength, while offering more options than simply attacking the enemy. The level generation is also more complex as it procedurally generates the entire dungeon at the start of the game to create a more detailed and randomized experience. I've also added new features like an array of unique playable characters, with their own strengths and weaknesses, and a retro pixel shader for a truly immersive retro experience. This shader changes the appearance of the game to add a pixelated effect to every object on screen giving it the appearance of an older game from the era that inspired this game jam.

This was made for Dungeon Crawler Jam 2021, the goal of which was to make a first person grid based dungeon crawler. Inspired by video games from the 1980s, the main constraint for this jam was to make a game where the player can explore a dungeon in the first person; while movement itself is limited to 90 degree turns and grid based movement. Grid based in this context meaning that each step moves the player character from one space to another along a grid as opposed to freely moving wherever the player directs their character.

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Soli-Tarot

Built in Java using the Eclipse IDE and the JavaFX library for the user interface. At its core this is still klondike Solitaire, but because it's played with a tarot deck there are a few twists to gameplay. The two main changes revolve around the addition of the fifth suit, known as the triumphs or the major arcana. In traditional Solitaire cards must alternate red/black and while that's still true for the minor arcana, the rules for the triumphs is a little different. These cards don't alternate and can be played freely on cards from the minor arcana as long as it follows in descending order.

Although I originally built this in Java, I'm currently rebuilding the game in the Unity game engine using C#. I believe the best way around some limitations I encountered is to switch to the Unity engine so that I can make use of its more powerful and robust features. One of my biggest limitations was having to program each animation in the Java version. Unity provides much more powerful tools for creating and editing animations that I believe will allow me to make more detailed animations with relative ease.

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