The Story
My name is Ebeney Russell and I've just finished studying at Massey University, for my Bachelor of Creative Media Production. Being surrounded by game enthusiasts as I grew up, I naturally took a liking to video games. Not only playing, but how they work and what goes into making one.
Who I am
I grew up in the Wairarapa on dairy farms with my family. I was a country girl helping my father with the calf’s and building my own imaginary tree houses. When I was nine, I moved to the city Palmerston north, then 3 years later to Levin to live a more urban lifestyle (no more early starts to catch a bus). Throughout the years I was playing PS2 console games such as Crash Bandicoot, and Rachet & Clank. In 2014 we finally got a modem and I learnt about the internet. It wasn’t until 2015 that I downloaded steam and I bought my first PC game ‘viscera cleanup detail’, a game about cleaning up messy alien invasions. In 2016 I got my first Wacom tablet and started creating my first animations. In 2018 I started my degree, Bachelor of Creative Media Production, where I learnt about game development and the start of my Unity addition. I’ve now got 102 games on steam, a PS4 with all the new releases and a fancy drawing tablet, all that I’m proud of and happy to have. Games have made up most of my life and now that’s all I want to create and work towards.
Hobbies
In my spare time I love to develop games, paint, create 2D animatics, create Voxel art and draw.
I'm currently interested in creating more mobile games, I've only made one and I want to learn more about creating games for this device. I also still want to develop more on my 3D voxel art game as I feel like it has great potential.
I've found creating Ink drawings is a great pastime. I would say my ink art style is like the game Machinarium or a mix between Doctor Seuss and Tim Burton. My painting style is surreal art, as I like to create realistic looking animals with a twist (snail with holes it is moving on a stack of cards). When I was younger, I was heavily into creating 2D animatics but haven’t created anything decent in a while.
Recently I’ve been interested in looking into different art styles in games, such as Voxel art. Creating small animals and then animating them is so much fun. I found voxel art through playing the Unrailed which I have spent many hours playing.
I work hard on my personal game projects in my own time, as that is what I enjoy to do.
What I've been up to
For the past 3 years I have been developing small games in Unity and assisting in projects made in Unreal. All projects I’ve worked on has been mostly focused on the programming, as that is what I enjoy the most, but I also enjoy game design/ level design, the overall pipeline can be quite fun!
Each game I make, I attempt to try adding new features and code methods that I’ve never personally done before, I do this to improve my knowledge on C# code and to create features more efficiently. Every project that I’ve worked on so far has had a min 6-week time limit attached to it except more my final year project, which is a year long.
Solo Game Projects (Unity)
The first game I ever created was a 3D vertical puzzle game, where the goal was to rescue a princess, stuck in a cage, at the end of the puzzle. The twist was once you saved the princess you then replaced her in the cage, forever being trapped until the next soul makes it through the puzzle. The puzzle itself could only be completed when it was invisible making the game even harder. I also created all the models myself in Maya and Blender.
Next game I created was a top down horror game inspired by Darkwood. You play as a farmer that when returning home find your wife and child missing and a strange portal in your bedroom. When exploring the portals location, you unleased a horrid monster who wants to kill you. You must run and escape back home to retrieve your weapons to kill the creature. This project I had to learn a lot about unity lights and shaders to get the restricted FOV. I created all models myself and had to learn about state machines to animate my main character and creatures. I learnt about creating projectiles, particle effects, sounds in unity, unity text, dialogue system, and many more features.
I’ve also worked on project that only every made it to concept faze. This was Dragoria – Tale of Eva, a 2D platformer farming sim. The pixel art style, that I created, looked amazing but took a long time to do. Which made the project an impossibly long task to create, which is why I dropped the project to work more on other projects that were more manageable.
My first mobile game was a solo project and a research assignment. This meant it wasn't taught in my course. I had to gather my own resources to learn about mobile development. I wanted it to have branching dialogue that would give the player different outcomes to the game this led me to learn Ink (branching dialogue application). I learned quickly through builds on my phone that I had to keep the graphics quality low otherwise the game would have low performance. Overall, it was a tough project with many ups and down in production. I was able to finish the entire first level with Sally and find this to be a huge achievement (Even having multiple game outcomes).
Currently working on another farming Sim. This time it’s 3D and made with voxel art. I don’t want it to be something complicated just something I can show my friends and family and would be easy for them to play.
Collaborative Game Projects (Unity)
Day Dreamer
My first collaborative game project was a VR game called Day Dreamer. I was an assisting producer and only game programmer. It was a small team of 6 and the first project where I could focus on programming and not have to worry about art or sound. It was also my first taste of organising a team. I enjoyed learning about VR games and working with the headset. I was also the only team member that owned a headset, so the entire project relied on my coding and testing (I had to send screen recordings of me playing the game to get feedback from the team). Overall enjoyed this project and made me want to start producing my own ideas again but having a team to help bring those ideas to life.
Pinemelon Ranch
One of the biggest projects I've worked on was Pinemelon Ranch, a 2D farming sim and tower defence game. I was the producer and only game programmer. There was 4 in our team and we managed to create an entire tutorial with all the features that was 20 minutes of gameplay (Finishing quests to unlock all the farming tools). You arrive at your farm that your father has purchased for you, where you meet his friend that helps you start out. During the day, you plant and grow crops, tidy the farm, place towers and look after your animals, while at night you defend your farm from an invasions of cactus people that want to eat your animals.
In the game you could hoe the ground, plant seeds, chop trees with an axe, break rocks with a pickaxe, catch bugs, use a sword to kill enemies, place towers, sell items, shear and milk animals, harvest plants, feed animals, and that is almost everything. The game had a lot to create and It was a real challenge for me with the coding. I learnt so much about Unity in this project. My greatest takes were: Object pooling, my own A* algorithm, stats (health, hunger etc), scriptable objects, inventory system, state machines (animals and people), tile mapping, mathF, looting, and others.
Overall was a hard project with a great outcome. We had a game testing night where we had 6 computers that had people constating coming and going playing the game giving us feedback. Our tutor said he couldn’t break the game which was a great success. We only had 8 weeks part time to create the game. I have many ideas on how to improve the game if I ever continued it and I very much enjoyed working with 2D in Unity.
Neocense
The hardest and most enjoyable project I’ve work on is Neocense. At the start of 2020 I came up with the idea of a puzzle adventure game where you hunt ghosts in a spirit realm. I pitched this idea to my cohort and gathered a team of 10 year 3 students (Would go down to 9 due to a team member producing no work). We went into pre-production developing on this idea into an isometric puzzle game where you explore the spirit realm in order to solve puzzles.
We prototyped for many weeks, going from an open world plan to the final design, screen bound. I loved collaborating with the team often having white board sessions with Luca Rosseel developing this idea. During lockdown (Due to Covid-19) we used Discord to communicate with having weekly meetings as well as daily meetings for departments. Trello was a great resource for us to use, with organizing everyone’s tasks. Perforce became my best friend in lockdown, knowing what people had checked out and being able to keep track of the tasks that were getting done in the project. Honestly this project needed a good source control like Perforce to operate the way it did.
Being the main programmer on this project was a big task. With having other departments producing work for the game I often found myself spending hours implementing their animations and dialogue. I enjoyed all of it, but my work life balance was nonexistence for many weeks (Some would say “That’s the life of a student”). I didn’t ever want to find myself in that situation where I wasn’t able to have free time, but I knew that production was ending at the end of the year and wanted our final project to be the best it can be. I feel like my sacrifice payed off with the game having an amazing feel and tone exactly what we wanted. With average gameplay lasting over an hour.
We had many public and internal play testing events at Massey all with amazing turn outs. Our game wouldn’t be as good as it is without our testers coming into development. I learned a lot this year with the workload I had and also having the extra job of mentoring year 2 programmers. I loved mentoring my year 2’s as they wanted to learn more about programming and talking to someone that is just as passionate as you are is an amazing experience. I can see myself in the future mentoring other aspiring programmers, showing them better practices.
Unreal Game Projects
In Unreal I have the least experience. I have worked on the project Acolyte, a 3D exploration game, where I was a game programmer. I worked on all their state machines, designing and helping add all the code I needed to into their controllers. I found blueprints to be interesting being so visual instead of having to write everything. I must say I still prefer C# over blueprints as a personal opinion (not saying C# is better or anything). I learnt about breakable meshes and physics sounds (when walking on grass and then changing to wooden floor).
I also worked on a racing car game in Unreal. It was an exercise to get me to learn the basics of Unreal and learn about how they work their variables. The game was simple, I had a timer that set your best lap time, there was a max number of laps and if the car was to crash or be unable to move there was a check point system that would reset the car. Nothing fancy but really did help with my understanding.
Please enjoy my portfolio, and feel free to get in touch with any questions.