Gabriel O'Flaherty-Chan
Select work 2015-2025
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Cleaning Game - Pathfinding
Towards Summer 2016, I began to realize that my Cleaning game was all style and no substance.
I had spent so much time perfecting animations and artwork, but completely ignored game mechanics, or anything that would make the experience entertaining gameplay-wise. As a result, I made the decision to completely reboot the project, dropping SceneKit in favour of something more prototype-friendly: Unity.
From an empty canvas, the original concept evolved quickly. The first change was to characters: Whereas originally you controlled a single bot, controlling a small swarm instead was more entertaining, and flexible as a mechanic. In an effort to not get distracted by aesthetics whatsoever, I stuck solely to primitive geometry for a while.
Only a week later, I had a prototype which demonstrated bots (represented by gray boxes below) expressing preference for “cleanable” objects (cyan boxes), and properly redistributing themselves according to workload. I strongly feel this exercise would have taken far more time with Apple’s immature game tools.
For all of June, I spent time building basic pathfinding so the bots wouldn’t bump into each other. What I thought would be a simple task, ended up requiring far more complexity than I anticipated (ie. A*), and towards the end, I finally decided to adopt Unity’s builtin Navmesh system instead.
Snapshots taken along the way helped document progress:
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"BITFIELD"
Intergalactic warfare. 2024—Present.
Modelling every piece from a 1/144 Gundam kit in 100 days
Summer 2024
"CHAOTIC ERA"
A real-time strategy nightmare. 2020-2024.
Emojivision
Emoji goggles for your phone. Summer 2022.
Mr. Paint
Paint cubes in 3D. Summer 2018.