Top secret project

A giant question mark against a blurred globe. — What could it be?

I bet you’re wondering to yourself, “that portfolio hasn’t been updated in ages - have they died, or worse, have they given up the codesmithing life to pursue a lucrative career in human/octopus relations?” If you’re wondering that, you are so, so wrong. Human/octopus relations are very important. Also, I’m working on a top secret project that’s taking up a lot of my development time lately.

Playthroughline

Screen capture of the Playthroughline script formatting, complete with photocopy grunge

Screen capture of the Playthroughline editing interface

In late 2015, my good friend Joannes asked me to redesign the blog I had originally created for him back in 2009. We migrated all the site content from WordPress to Drupal. The new site is based on a mobile-friendly responsive foundation, like all of my current projects, and attention was paid to the display and loading of images on phones and tablets.

I implemented aspects of Google’s Material Design visual language, the paper sheet aspect of which worked perfectly with the satirical videogame scripts he and his contributors post to the site. We worked on a photocopy grunge effect to apply to the script sheets, complete with holes punched out of the left edge.

The administration interface is significantly improved, with custom extensions to TinyMCE (a rich text editor), which allows the authors to paste and edit scripts via a graphical interface. MoxieManager is used as a file and image manager, for simple uploading and linking. As a result, the interface is very easy to use for non-technical authors.

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East End Community Health Centre

I was tasked with rebuilding the East End Community Health Centre’s legacy website (static HTML pages generated with Microsoft FrontPage) into a modern, responsive Drupal site in early 2015. The logo and colour scheme were maintained, while the site was completely redesigned as a minimal interface for clients to find the information they need. The existing content was migrated to Drupal, and a user-friendly editing system was made available so that non-tech oriented workers at the centre could update the site pages, the news section, and upload various files (such as PDFs) through a visual file manager.

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Anxiety Recovery Toronto

I designed and developed this website on a volunteer basis for the group facilitators between January to March 2012. I migrated their resources section from their old static site onto a new content-driven site powered by Drupal. They now have a fully functional blog that can be easily updated with little-to-no technical knowledge via a user-friendly interface. The site now has a dynamic calendar system which displays the upcoming group meetings and other events, all easily updated by the clients. With the change to a more regularly updated site, I added links to an RSS newsfeed, email updates, and their Facebook page in the sidebar.

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Satirical game logos

Two Mass Effect 3 logos, one of which is reworded to spell "Mess Effect 3"

Two Dishonored logos, one of which is reworded to spell "Disheveled"

My friend Joannes asked me to slightly reword the logos of several games that that he wrote hilarious and biting satirical scripts for. These involved a fairly in-depth understanding of Adobe Photoshop and made heavy use of the rubber stamp tool to remove the existing letters, and a lot of compositing with layers so that the new letters looked like they had been there all along. The scripts for each game can be found here:

Half-Life models

A promo image of in-game scientist models.

A promo image of in-game security guard models and their details.

A promo image of the in-game alien slave (Vortigaunt) model in various poses and showing the increased detail of the mesh.

A promo image of the various human soldier models in various poses, heads, and skin colours.

In the early 2000s, I was involved in the Half-Life modding scene. The Playstation 2 version of the game had been released, and a bunch of us had discovered how to extract the more detailed character models that had shipped with that version of the game, in contrast to the really blocky and far less detailed ones in the 1998 PC version. Using this data, we mixed together the high polygon meshes of the Playstation 2 version with the higher resolution texture capacity of PCs at the time. Because the game had been designed with modding in mind, dropping our assets into the game was relatively easy from a technical point of view; the actual work of creating the assets was the real challenge.

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Half-Life Improvement Team

This is a game development group that is currently dormant in which I’ve played a large role. It’s mostly written from scratch, without a content management system. The news content is pulled from the forum software, while the rest is stored in the database. The design is entirely mine, based upon an in-game interface from the old game we were trying to revive.

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