Jacqueline Passehl

Gaze was my capstone group project, for which I worked on over the course of 6 months 

The Game concept is that you play as a constellation creature/celestial being who uses the stars from within to shoot out into objects to make them move. The game is a 3D puzzle platformer and the basic premise revolves around rebuilding broken constellations.

For this project I worked as a systems and gameplay programmer. On the project I have been working on the player movement, camera, and particle effects.

I applied various optimization techniques to a number of existing Visual Studios C++ projects to boost performance. Those optimization techniques include: reworked data structures to improve memory usage and data caching, enhanced vector and matrix math library by using SIMD, developed custom heap-based memory system to overload new and delete/malloc and free operators, refactored code to remove implicit conversions, applied return value optimization, and refactored a particle system as the final project as pictured in the gif below.

Viridian was a large scale engine project that I worked on during the course of my junior year at Depaul University. It was a fantastic way to get me better acquainted with object-oriented programming, design patterns, and collision math.

In this engine, I implemented modular architecture via design patterns such as singleton.command, and visitor patterns. I built simple systems for game objects,scenes,update,draw,input, collision (Axis Aligned Bounding Box,Object,Oriented Bounding Box,Bounding Sphere), alarms, debug visualization, and terrain.

This engine was built up from a graphics library in C++ made with Visual Studio's IDE.  All the source code (excluding the graphics library I began with) is up on my github to view.

Snow Angel is a game I worked on as a gameplay and systems programmer for an independent study in fall 2017 and as a group project from the summer. The goal of the independent study was to create a game that was suitable for festival submissions. 

Snow Angel is a endless runner game where you play as a penguin and manipulate the environment through use of the mouse drag to create lines of ice that the penguin can walk on and use to  propel forward. The penguin moves with a state machine with various conditions for jumping,sliding, and moving.

On this project, I worked on programming a state machine for the penguin 's various jumping,sliding, and moving conditions. I also setup a singleton for the player controller. This was the first real game that I made during my time  at Depaul and I learned a lot about implementing design patterns in Unity as well as programming movement for a 2D character.

Life's a Beach was a submission for Global Game Jam 2017 and it won "Best Overall Game" at the Depaul University site. 

I was one of two programmers on our team and we wanted to portray a polished gameplay loop that consisted of local play and fun. Our goal for the 48 hour game jam was to make something off the theme of "waves". So we chose to create a game about hermit crabs trying to find the biggest shell that could protect them from the incoming waves. Each wave would push you back further if you weren't in a shell and once a  player reached the biggest shell, the game is over!

On this project I was the one that programmed the wave movement as well the mechanic of pushing back other hermit crabs. This was my first Global Game Jam, the first project where I spent 48 continuous hours working on a game so it was a fun experience to see how much work I was able to get done within that short time frame.