EMgine is a game development tool for designers to give their NPCs "emotions". It does this by providing a library for "generating emotions" given the current state of the game entity "expriencing " emotion and the game world. The end goal is to give designers another option for making believable and emotionally engaging game characters.

Game design is both a creative and technical endeavour, so I am using a user-centric design approach to ensure that both game designers and players are always at the forefront of EMgine's design. This lead to the library design, which affords game designers the choice of when, how, and what parts of it they use in their games. Game designer needs also drove the decision to use C# because it is one of the programming languages supported in Unity Game Engine.

It was 2022, so I decided that a personal website was an important part of making myself known in academia and industry (especially because I'm trained to do software engineering...). And here we are!

Web development was new to me, so it was also an opportunity to learn new things. This was why I chose to use the Next.js React Framework and Bulma CSS Framework instead of something like WordPress or Jekyll.

My goals are to present relevant and interesting things about myself and my work, while also creating a visually appealing and responsive website. I also aimed to make this webpage accessible by following WACG to the best of my understanding. I'm sure there are many accessibility improvements to make, so do feel free to open a Git Issue in this webpage's repository.

I admire many of Ubisoft's games, so naturally I jumped at the chance to participate in their Game Design Challenge. Centering on the theme "my morning routine", I focused on a challenge that I face almost daily: escaping my apartment without one of my adorable cats tearing a hole in my stockings.

I settled on a horror-style stealth game comparable to Frictional Games' Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Bloober Team's Layers of Fear. I decided to play with the idea of feline spirits that are either out to get you, or will (maybe) help you. I submitted a successful one-page pitch describing a the concept and plans for prototyping and testing it. Next, I created a Design Solution Presentation, outlining the intended player experience and success criteria, my inspirations for the design, the game feature itself, and how I would build a prototype in five weeks. Unfortunately, I was not invited to continue past this stage. Still, I am very pleased with the ideas I created for this and I am grateful for the opportunity to work on my game design skills.

I created this tool for my GLaDOS project , named for a character in the Portal games—to help me test the range of a mathematical function when the domain of its variables is known. I completed it as a course project, paying particular attention to the design process and accompanying documentation. I implemented C³ in C# because of its GUI Builder tool so that the finished project would be more user-friendly (and nicer to look at).

Before my work on EMgine, my investigation into believable game characters "with emotions" got me to try modding. This allowed me to work with a pre-existing game with well-defined characters so that I only needed to worry about how emotion "worked" rather than how I could test them in a game. The modding community for Skyrim is very large and active, so it is a good place for experiementing with different ideas to see how they affect the game's player experience.

This was a fun and interesting look into one of Bethesda's development tools and their implementation of characters. I designed my mod so that characters all used the same "processing" modules; their differences are contained in character-specific "configuration data" based on a set of tags I created. Each character is assigned "values" with data necessary for emotion generation. Picking these values was entertaining because I got to imagine how each character feels about different aspects of their world based on their—often sparse—narrative descriptions.

Even though I was only able to give the citizens of Windhelm emotions with the time I had, it was still enough for my play testers to notice and be intrigued by the characters' new reactions to them.