Portfolio

Making and playing games for most of my life has taught me a great deal. I’ve worked as a freelance developer and with freelancers who built assets for my games, giving me experience on both sides of that workflow.

I have been developing 2D games in Unity for over ten years. In that time I’ve become very familiar with the engine and its quirks. My extensive experience with the Unity engine includes the Unity UI system, the Unity Animator, editor scripting, particle systems, ensuring pixel perfect graphics in the engine, event driven programming, software engineering concepts and version control via Github. I am accustomed to writing code in a way that is modular, extensible, readable and well-documented.

I’ve also developed skills at making pixel art using Aseprite, creating 3D models using Blender, and project management using Notion.

My Games

The first game I created with Unity was Guildmaster: Gratuitous Subtitle, a turn-based tactical combat game set in an irreverent fantasy world.

I worked with artists who contributed some of the art assets, such as the character models and portraits, as well as a writer and musician.

I learned so much from making this game. Including what went right, but also the many things that went wrong. I marketed too late, my inexperience with coding a project of this size led to huge technical debt and I don’t think it had enough immediate visual appeal to make it stand out from how many other great games are out there.

But I have put into practice everything I learned in my next project…

Fire All Weapons is a turn-based roguelike deckbuilder in which you play the captain of a starship trying to get home and doing battle with a variety of strange aliens.

I’m approaching the development with everything in mind that I learned from Guildmaster. Taking a more structured approach to the coding, marketing from day one and doing open development with dev logs and game dev streams where I share the process and get feedback as the game is created.

Inspired by games like Slay the Spire, FTL and Star Control 2, I hope to create a game that is an exciting mix of turn based tactical gameplay and fun space adventure.

 

Freelancing

I also have many years experience working with clients as a freelance Unity developer.

I’ve worked with Cyber Security Challenge to create educational games on the subject of cyber security, which were deployed as WebGL games on the website www.cybergamesuk.com

CSC were always a pleasure to work with and I learned a lot about cyber security in the process. The games I developed have been used in schools across the UK to help teach secondary school students about cyber security. 

“JimMakesGames is a long time collaborator with the Challenge, turning our cyber education games ideas into fantastically accessible and enjoyable materials. Totally professional and reliable Jim makes games development work a really enjoyable and rewarding experience.”

– Margaret Jones, Cyber Security Challenge

Hiring

If you’re interested in hiring me feel free to contact me at contact@jimmakesgames.com