Hivemind

This is a show I love but still have trouble trying to explain. Basically there's a bunch of games I created like balancing a see-saw or avoiding an ever growing black hole that moves around the screen, everyone in the audience joins using their phone and is given a character they control on screen. The games are all cooperative which I think is much more fun and leads to a great sense of comradery. First put on as aprt of Scene + Heard in 2025 Mark & I put it on again as a full show(almost 2 hours long) with more games and the games remade in Godot which helped speed things up for adding new games. I still have loads of ideas for more games to add but took a break from it as I did spend a lot of my spare time in 2024 on it. I've learned a lot about Godot in the mean time and there are parts of it I'd like to rewrite to work better as parts of the code are a bit of a mess. You have not see the last of Hivemind!

Confession

Confession is a dark comedy of blackmail set in a rural Irish village. The parish priest is manipulating one of his parishioners for his own gains through what he has learned in a scandalous confession. Things take a turn when the local Guard starts asking questions. I wrote this with Ben Razey & Mikey Fleming it was based on a improv scene we did that was set entirely in a Church confession box. It was only on for a couple of nights at the start of 2020 and starred Ben Razey, Dan McCormack & Mark Cantan. You can watch a recording here.

Katana Land

Graduating into a very bad recession where there was no jobs at all my friend and I starting working on a game. This evolved a lot over time as we figured out what worked and what didn't but eventually turned into Katana Land a 2D side scrolling beat em up type game. THere was regular enemies, tougher elites that hit harder, undead enemies that would only ever temporarily die. I did all of the programming on this with my friend James handling the art. This was in 2009 before the time of Unity & Godot making the barrier to entry for making games so much lower. I had to create the engine from scratch using XNA and had to create a level editor as well. We released it on Xbox Live Indie Games and it sold something like 1000 copies but in terms of money it never met the threshold for us getting the money which always felt like a scam. Someone recorded and uploaded a full play through it on YouTube. It's a bit rough in parts but it was a project I had a tough time finishing due to becoming incredibly depressed at the time. I think it could have been something much better but I don't think it would have been worth the even bigger hit to my mental health.

Research Station Mars

This was my final year project in college. I set out to make a game inspired by Dungeon Keeper & Evil Genius where you had to build a base and keep your employees happy while they went about their business. Machines would break down requiring janitors to fix them, but they wouldn't work if they were tired or hungry so you needed to have beds and snack machines for them. It was fairly simple but the basics were all there and I'm proud of what I made with so little experience at the time and was delighted with my grade of 90%. I put a lot of work into this, I submitted it in a box with a manual and everything. I tried running it as is but it doesn't do anything, I have the source code still I might try to get it running on modern systems.