Porter's PortfolioQuality Assurance - Computer Science - Game Design
Portfolio
Publications
About
I am a senior at Digipen pursuing a Bachelor of Computer Science and Game Design. I have specialized
in quality control and have experience working in C and C++ language custom engines. I have helped
build a custom engine from the ground up and coded its physics, collision, and light mapping math.
Over the past three years, I have developed five student games, three of which are on Digipen’s game
gallery. I have experience working on teams as small as three people and as large as 21 people.
I am currently open to work.
I was very fortunate to be able to give a talk to DigiPen's 2025 Junior GAM350 teams. This talk was overseen by the professors of the GAM350 course, but I was granted reigns over assembling the information and presenting everything. I was given a time limit of 30 minutes and tasked with introducing the teams to Unreal Engine 5's built-in optimization tools and covering how to use them.
Remanence is a first-person souls-like where players enter a post-apocalyptic world. They must rise up, master the mechanics of combat, and defeat the ruinous robotic overlord.
Remanence is the product of 25 multi-discipline team members and ~1.5 years of development. With a team this large, communication and information clarity were high priorities for us. As the producer, I was in charge of making sure information was readily available for team members who were confused. I did this through announcements and meeting notes that were shared with the team weekly.
As Quality Director, I created a bug-tracking spreadsheet to centralize our bug reports. The spreadsheet was readily available to all team members. To properly submit a bug report, the spreadsheet mandated that every cell was filled before the report could be submitted. This provided the technical team with enough information to have a starting point for debugging.
To keep the bug-tracking spreadsheet organized and readable, I taught myself Visual Basic and created a macro that automatically accepted, validated, and constructed the reports. This meant I did not have to worry about organizing the reports by hand if a team member had not properly done so themselves, allowing bug reporting to be approachable for everyone.
A key component of our game was a difficulty. We wanted combat to be hard to master but very rewarding. We held meetings and playtests weekly in order to pin down several core ideas. 1. What did players find fun? 2. Were players interacting with the mechanics in their intended ways? 3. What was within scope? My role was to make sure every decision made by the team was based on the feedback we received, documented, and shared in an easily accessible way. This allowed for steps to be retraced in the event of confusion on why certain decisions were made.
Elemental Surge is a 2D action platformer where players are tasked with ascending the tower and defeating the elemental guards of a once-mighty but fallen king.
Elemental Surge uses the same engine as Chlorofell, however, it has been slightly altered and improved to handle 2D games more efficiently. The physics were also altered to work in a side-scrolling environment.
Level layouts were designed to make players feel like they were truly exploring the castle while ascending it. Dangers lurked in the form of enemies and spike pits, but there were also treasures to be found in the form of elemental powers that helped in level traversal. Some parts of the levels were designed to have players swap between elemental forms to complete platforming puzzles.
Enemies provide challenges in making players swap between elemental forms to maximize the damage dealt. Each form has a unique way of attacking and moving, so players learn the best ways to handle their foes. Enemies also keep players thinking by changing their elemental type while in combat. This keeps combat fresh and prevents players from spamming certain elements for easy victories.
A tough and satisfying boss fight is what awaits players at the top of the evil king’s tower. This fight was designed and balanced to test players’ knowledge of the game mechanics. From changing the boss’s attack patterns to changing how the boss moves, many alterations have been made to this final fight.
Chlorofell is a student game project developed a custom 'C++' engine. Players are placed in a post apocalyptic world where they play a sencient plant creature that must rise against the machine hivemind that has taken over the planet.
Chlorofell was built in the Flintlock engine. We worked to make the interface as robust as possible so designers and artists could work in as familiar environment as possible. Features were created to match the teammembers' requests.
One of the exciting features that I helped work on is the dynamic lighting system. I helped optimize the system so that there were fewer redundant calculations thus improving our framerate.
I also worked on the collision and physics logic for the game engine. The physics are calculated in a way so that collisions are accurate even at lower framerates or spikes in performance. This was done using dynamic programming methods to verify the player's positions.
Client:
Laughing Stock
Date:
August 2022 - April 2023
Role:
Game Physics
Rock It
Rock-It is a student game project developed in a custom 'C' engine. Players take the role of chief leader of a dwarf community as they work to become spaceborne. At the same time, elves will occasionaly come an ransack the city, destroying and stealing supplies.
I worked on developing a pipeline to allow for buildings to be easily implemented into the game by our designers. Spritesheets, building production values and costs, and building research requirements were all taken into consideration when creating the pipeline. This pipeline allowed for buildings to quickly be created and modifyed based on playtesting data.
Performance was also imporant for our game. We wanted players to be able to build a large city. In order to do this, I helped in optimizing the graphics of our game.
Players were given a large array of buildings that allowed them to progress through the technological ages. We were also able to experiment with multi-tile buildings, as seen on the far right of the playing field. This is thanks to the aforementioned pipeline.
The elf attacks were prone to bugs in the early stages of developement. From bizarre calculations to attack rates, all sorts of bugs popped up and were tracked. We used a centralized channel to discuss and distribute the developement and bugfix workload.
