hello, im toffee! i'm an engine programmer for an AAA studio
i studied AI and created self-learning robots at newcastle university. i now study and write about my adventures in learning the art of game design
the talk "practical creativity" by raph koster is incredibly valuable, all of his talks are great https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyVTxGpEO30
for the 2023 boss rush jam, miredly and i made a small twin stick called "ferra" as our first venture using the monogame framework. this video is of the prior WR holder, generationinja - "Ferra in 59.16 seconds"
my first and still most popular game, white is a hack and slash made for games made quick??? 1½ while watching halfcoordinated's nier automata run
a niche favourite among close friends, i still think this is one of the simplest and most original ideas ive had for a puzzle game. made for the magical girl jam which was full of great fun people
i made a small momodora fangame over the course of 4 months during univeristy. this is my most polished game, but is derivative, so unreleased in any form. this demo is 1 area, with multiple characters with storylines, and a final boss. this was made in love2d
(cont.) making this fangame gave me experience creating bespoke tools that was friendly for content creators (inc. user stories, user testing & feedback response), i got much better at art and colour theory, ui design, and gnarlier game design fundamentals line nonlinear stories and worlds, designing & maintaining interest curves, character writing and boss design
bunny factorio! i love factorio, but wish the combat was toned down, bringing the puzzle-ness of automation to the foreground. i made this cutesy alternative, gave it to some hardcore automation-gamer friends, with great feedback! i'm happy with the core of this game, all that needs doing for it is fleshing out content. i've let this sit for a while so ideas can build
as practice for networking, i made a fighting game with GGPO-style blended rollback netcode. this was a very fun project, but lots of people are making traditional fighting games that look great. i'd like to come up with a very fresh mechanical idea before fulfilling a fighting game project
another rollback netcode fighter, but this time experimenting with different gameplay mechanics. this was a lot of fun to make and play
a quick project inspired by vampire survivors' recent release, i made a witchy skully shooter thing. this had a fully fledged gun building system, where after you collect a number of gems, you unlock a random perk. this gun crafting system turned out to not be fun at all, and the game was more fun just shooting enemies with default guns. i've shelved it for now, but i'd love to go into detail about why it didn't work
inspired by raph koster's "practical creativity", i made an online multiplayer chess game with the topology of a card game. this game became a small fad in my friend group and they said the idea was "lightning in a bottle" which i thought was lovely, but i didn't want to persue this further
a VR mod of Meteorite by bauxite. this practice for making games in VR and understanding different technical considerations needed for the new medium
i wrote a neural network in c for practice in cache friendly coding. it's pretty zoomy fast. so fast that i could make this fun realtime visualiser and learner. it's quite rudamentary - it doesn't take biases into account and only supports the single multilayer perceptron model, but that covers most of my own use cases
tsys is a simple 12 bit risc cpu architecture made in logisim with a custom assembly language and assember, which supports really basic programs and text output. it sucks very much. made it as logic gate arithmetic practice, where all binary arithmetic (the ALU) is made entirely from scratch with simple logic gates
wavefront64 is a really simple program which converts .obj files into a procedural string of code meant to be used with the nintendo64 development kits. since the n64 can only load 32 vertices at a time, it uses a custom bin packing algorithm to minimise the amount of required memory swapping of vertices. i made this a very long time ago so it's messy magic to me now
i currently work for a work-for-hire AAA game development studio. the majority of my professional work is unfortunately NDA, sorry for the empty section!
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