Shaine Buzzard's Portfolio
A bit about me: My name is Shaine Buzzard and I am in the process of completing my bachelor's degree at Southern New Hampshire University. Majoring in Game Programming and Development, I balance my education with a full time job working as an IT and Supply Chain Support Technician in upstate New York. The following portfolio is a showcase of the skills I have learned and developed over the last handful of years in the form of four artifacts that I have improved upon during my studies. I have arranged these artifacts to show the progression of my work throughout my educational journey with SNHU. Artifact One is the environment design of a single level of a game that had been originally designed during one of my first courses at the beginning of my studies. It demonstrates my 3D world building skills within Unreal Game Engine and the introduction to including foliage to give the world a realistic feel. Artifact Two takes a different path from the typical game engine work and showcases my abilities to animate objects in Adobe Animate. A very simple animation of a ball bouncing doesn't seem like much but for someone with zero previous knowledge of animation, I felt like this was a great way to show off that I am always willing to learn new things and can do so in a quick and efficient way. Artifact Three was a group project that I worked on during GAM-305 during my last year of studies at SNHU. My team and I created a virus-killing game and I focused on the user interface and user experience aspects of the game. One of the points of feedback from the professor was that he wished he could see some sort of radar to show to player where the enemies were located. From this feedback, I created a mini-map in Unreal Game engine that could be implemented into the original group project game. And finally, Artifact Four started as a proof of concept for the inventory system of a game that I began to design in an earlier class. And while it is still a work in progress, I have at least created a way to view objects in a tumbler viewer which allows a player to rotate objects which is one aspect of the inventory system. As someone who balances full time class with full time employment -- both remote -- I have learned to develop different communication skills that could help in a future career especially as we continue to live in a pandemic. I have spent the last two years learning all about writing clear and effective code in a variety of programming languages and on a number of game engines, game graphics and artificial intelligence, and even concise documentation. This portfolio, and the process of creating the artifacts for this capstone project, has allowed me to see how the various classes that I took along the way fit together to provide the range of skills necessary for someone in the game industry and related fields. I have been given ample opportunities to explore future careers and to focus on a handful of skills required for my future.
ARTIFACT ONE:
This first artifact is the environment design of the world in which my game The Vanished: Homecoming is set. With the help of a custom heightmap imported into Unreal Game Engine, I was able to create the landscape to match what I had in mind for the game design. I then spent the time to paint the landscape with various realistic landscape materials and then added foliage to give the world that realistic approach as opposed to my first attempt at environment design. This was created using Unreal Engine 4 and showcases my ability to not only use the game engine but my skills in 3D graphics as well. While creating and polishing this artifact, I had to learn better environment design skills than those that I had learned at the very beginning of my game design journey. It was challenging in that I had little time to learn new skills and encountered many issues along the way that I had to find solutions for. The main hurdle was figuring out how to include foliage, especially grass and weeds that blew in the wind to simulate real world physics.
ARTIFACT TWO:
This next artifact showcases my ability to animate within Adobe Animate. My first attempt of this project a year ago proved to be unrealistic and did not meet my expectations at all. But seeing as it was my first ever attempt at animation, I was okay with submitting the file to be graded. Thankfully I was allowed to re-do this project during this capstone project. I was able to go back and re-work the path that the ball takes and the various movements of the ball itself while it bounces along the frame of the background. I wanted to include this artifact in my portfolio to showcase my 2D graphic and animation skills and my ability to somewhat reflect real life physics in a 2D setting. Before taking the animation class at the beginning of my educational journey, I had zero experience with animation and Adobe Animate. I had to learn how to use keyframes within the program to animate 2D objects. Below you can find my original (left) and my refined (right) attempt at animating a bouncing ball with Adobe Animate. You can see the original does not flow very well, the animation is slow and the movement of the ball is very unnatural. Meanwhile, in the refined project, I spent the time to not only squish the ball upon hitting the surface, but it also rotates as it bounces down the floor.
ARTIFACT THREE:
Artifact three comes in the form of a refinement to a group project I did during 21EW5 at SNHU in GAM-305. Myself and four others created a first-person virus shooter game and all of us were in charge of various aspects of the game. As someone who has been focusing a lot on user interface, I was in charge of the menus, HUD, and anything else UI/UX related during the project. Created in Unreal Game Engine version 4.25, this project and the refinement showcase my ability to use the game engine, design user interface, and even graphic design. The professor had some feedback for the project. One of which was a virus counter which would have been something I would have created if given a second chance. But seeing as a counter was deemed a bit simple of a refinement, I stuck to the professor's next suggestion -- some sort of radar to highlight where the enemies are on the map so the player can shoot them. This mini-map that I created for this capstone project serves as a radar to show where the enemies are in a level. While this was designed on a new level outside of the original group project files, the concept can be easily recreated inside the game files for the project.
ARTIFACT FOUR:
Artifact four goes back to the game I mentioned above in artifact one's backstory. Created as a proof of concept during GAM-465 in 21EW6, The Vanished: Homecoming is a game that I am slowly developing during my free time. For this artifact, however, I focused on the proof of concept I created in this previous class that describes the inventory system used in the game. To showcase in-game animation, user interface/experience, and inventory systems, I began to create the prototype for the game's inventory system. While it is all still a work in progress, I now have a 3D object viewer that can be imported into my game to implement in the eventual inventory system. The idea is to have the player collect objects through the game to search for clues and by having this tumbler or object viewer, the player can search the entire object for clues rather than just seeing a single side of whatever it is that they pick up. I wanted to create the actual inventory system but ran into time constraints and implementation challenges so I settled on just having the tumbler to showcase for now.
