Mitchell Dixon
Game Developer
Other Games
Battle of the Rexs
(Solent University Game Jam)
Spooky Treats
(Solent University Game Jam)
Role(s): Programming, Art & Game Design
This game was created in 3 hours for Solent University's spooky game jam. The theme was "Bones". We decided to create a game where you played a skeleton dog. The aim of the game was to collect as many bones on Halloween as possible without accidentally eating chocolate. My role on the team was to float between programming and art. I worked on whatever needed the most help at the time. I created the menu, UI, items and helped everyone work towards a common goal. I am very happy that we have a finished game which came 1st. I however do wish we had more time to test the game as i believe it could have been more fun with fine tuning.
Role(s): Programming, Art & Game Design
This game was created in 4 days for Southampton Solent's game jam. The theme was "Man's best friend". As I want to stretch the theme and make it my own, I interpreted man's best friend as: Robots, guns and bullets. I decided I would make a wave survival game where you could custom make your own robot. The core game-play loop is: Build a robot, kill enemies, get gold from enemies, die, build a new better robot with the gold and repeat. The robot creator definitely took most of the development time but it presented a lot of interesting problems that I hadn't solved before. For instance the robot creator grid can hold 10 by 10 parts which needed to be stored in a gameobject array. To get this to next scene (along with other data) I needed to save it to file. The problem was that Unity doesn't let you serialize gameobjects so my solution was to convert it to a float array. This require my save and load functions to loop through either the game object or float array to extract or store the player's robot. I would say that my biggest success would be handling feature creep when necessary. Theses features would of been great but luckily I foresaw that they would have taken too much time and I wouldn't of finished.
GP Mania
(Solent University Game Jam)
Role(s): Programming & Implementation
Arena Shooter
(Solo Game Jam)
(Designed for desktop, so might not run as intended)
This game was created in 3 hours for Southampton Solent's game jam. The theme was "Vitamins" and "Joke". The player has to help the GP cure the patient by carefully aiming the pills or spamming them. The GP encounters a lot of distractions when it comes to curing the patient so help them overcome it. I was responsible for the programming and implementation of designs and art. This was a very challenging game to make as we had to constantly consider scope and make cuts or adjustments based on time left. I think the success of the project definitely boiled down to accurate time estimates for tasks and cutting non-essential elements.
Role(s): Programming, Art & Implementation
This game was created the weekend after the "mechanical limitations" game jam, at Southampton Solent University. As the game we created was such a disaster it got me thinking what if we went in a different direction at the beginning. This split was created when we had to choose if we wanted the game to be a side-scroller or top-down, we went for side-scroller as we assumed it would be easier. This lead me to recreate our game with the exception of it being top-down. It worked out much better and turned out to be enjoyable to play. I also learnt a lot about Unity and how to be more efficient and get interesting results from it. My favourite element that I programmed was the spawners for boxes and a range of enemies. They took quite a bit of fine tuning but worked as intended.
My First Game:
(Solo Project)
Role(s): Art & Implementation
This is a top down stealth game where you have to get the end without being seen by guards or being shot by defense turrets. I loved playing around with construct 2's easy to use features, that allowed me to create some satisfy elements. My favourite part of making this game was the path-finding and creating patterns that challenged the player.
Waist of Time
(Game Jam)
Role(s): Art (environment) and Implementation
The theme for this game jam was "Time" and our game was a platformer where you could rewind time to solve puzzles. I was happy with how most of my level designs turned out and found it fun to design puzzles around our core mechanic. Ironically a lack of time and poor time management meant our game was buggy and not a 100% what we envisioned. I felt like the team really pulled together to solve this and we managed to get it semi-functional for the demonstration. This was a tough week where we all worked minimum 10 to 12 hours on it per day. The crunch was difficult for me but it has given me many insights into crunching and how not to burn out because of it.
(Game jam)
Role(s): Project Lead and Programming
Gun-Shank Redemption
The theme of this game jam, hosted by Southampton Solent University, was "Mechanical limitations". My team decided to go for the insanity angle and went about creating Gun-Shank redemption based on a load of cool ideas we had. This didn't go as planned and ended up being a game with decent art but absolutely no challenge. This is because we evaluated the mechanics individually but when combined they just didn't turn out as planned. This taught me a lot about pre-planning, being realistic, and making sure you know where the project is headed before you get there.