Choice Provisions: Choice Publishing Website

One of Choice Provision’s latest offerings is not for gamers, but for game developers! Get your own game off the ground with help from a successful indie studio who’s been through it all before.

On the main page, instead of your average image carousel, I built a full-page tile board that scales with your screen size and features 4 games at once, the order being customizable on the back-end. The background images fade to color as you hover (a theme carried throughout the site).

I also made an attempt at some illustrations for the about page that mimic the style of the logo, designed by Ty Dunitz.

What you don’t get from these screenshots is how the whole site shifts between color and greyscale. Head over to choicepublishing.com for the full effect!

Double Fine: Spacebase DF-9 Website

Spacebase DF-9 is a space station simulation by Double Fine Productions. As with most of their games, I made them a one-page “mini-site” that provides a trailer, screenshots, a little information, and links to buy the game.

I’ve been wanting to experiment with scroll-based animations for a while, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. I used the skrollr library to handle all of the animation on the page (including the SVG animation of the gridlines), and it even works on mobile devices.

It was a lot of fun working with assets that were graciously provided straight from the game. I also recreated the computer console from the game in CSS and made some nice chunky buttons (CSS & SVG) to fit the theme.

You can view the live website and see the scrolling animations in action at http://spacebasedf9.com.

Choice Provisions: Responsive Retrofit

Not just your average responsive retrofit, I also helped move them from Gaijin Games to Choice Provisions on the web. That meant swapping out branding, touching things up here and there, and moving the site to totallychoice.com.

Don’t miss the slick new nav bar and mobile menu using the existing menu structure.

If you dig the new logo, head over to the website of Ty Dunitz. I had fun replacing some old background parallax stuff that didn’t work in Firefox (?!) with the new logo; very ominous.

Central Exterminating: Website

Full disclosure: this is the company my father works for! They were in desperate need of a website redesign, and I was happy to oblige.

Built with WordPress with a fully custom theme, this was my first live project to make use of SASS. The site features a mobile-first responsive design, a service map powered by Google Maps, social media integration, and a “Pest Database” built with custom post types.

View the site live at http://centralexterminating.com.

Venus Patrol: Responsive Retrofit

“Venus Patrol is a website in search of beautiful things from the world of videogames, founded by Brandon Boyer — chairman of the Independent Games Festival“; read more on the about page.

The website was launched in 2012 after a successful Kickstarter campaign which I totally missed. Soon after its debut, I contacted Brandon to lament about the lack of mobile responsiveness and offered my help in lieu of a missed Kickstarter pledge. He agreed, and so I had the absolute pleasure of adapting Cory Schmitz‘s design for smaller screens. To be clear, I did not contribute any graphic design; just lots of CSS and JavaScript and little bits of HTML here and there.

One of the more interesting challenges was writing some custom JavaScript to handle scaling down the weekly TIGSource DevLog post. It’s a big image made up of titles and screenshots of indie games in development, which are each a link to a TIGSource forum post.

Go have a look at http://venuspatrol.com.

ChromaWaves (iOS)

 

ChromaWaves was a student project that started in the fall of 2009 and was published to the App Store in the summer of 2010 (it is unfortunately no longer available since the team split up after graduation). It’s an ambient color mixing game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Essentially, you defend a water droplet in the center by firing colored bullets at similarly-colored enemies.

I was part of a team of 13 people that came together for a game design seminar jointly offered by Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Art. The goal of this semester-long class is to bring artists and coders together to make and publish/distribute a game that both functions and looks good. It was this project that helped me validate my desire to span the gap between artists and programmers.

I worked on a variety of things for ChromaWaves. I provided some of the visual effects animations, including the bullet, splash, and wave, as well as the iGameTeam logo and splash screen. While I did not directly contribute to the game code, I did build a simple program that automated the task of making sprite sheets from a folder of sprite frames.

Visit the official a copy of the original ChromaWaves website for more details about the game, and see this write up by fellow artist Andrew Kuhar on VentureBeat (archived from the defunct BitMob website), who also produced a series of podcasts about the development process and what we learned, accessible at the Escape Route blog (he also made the website!).

This was the second time I took this class; the year before we made Waterworks.