ALEX MANNING
About Me
Hi, I'm Alex Manning, a 20-year-old programmer with an interest in tools programming and technical art looking to expand my skill set.
I primarily have expertise in C#, C++, Java and the Unity game engine, and I am also familiar with Unreal engine, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, HLSL, and Python. I have been interested in computers for as long as I remember, and I started programming when I was 11. I also have developed secondary skills related to game development alongside my programming, including basic game design, 3D modelling, and technical art.
I am interested in any opportunities that can help me further my skill set and gain industry experience, particularly with game development. I am Canberra based, but I'm open to working remotely either nationally or internationally.
My Resume: Download
How's it growing
How's it growing was my first attempt at making a game with a multidisciplinary team, where we were tasked with creating a demo of an educational game by the Australian national botanic gardens. It showcases a variety of lifecycles that various plants go through, with various minigames focusing on different dispersal and germination methods. My main responsibility was the wind based minigame, where you had to control gusts of wind to blow the sail-like waratah seeds away from the plant. It was a very fun and informative experience of how to work with a team to produce a product under a time limit with specifications from a client.
Trailer: Youtube
Game Download: Itch.io
Custom phsyics engine
This is my attempt at building a custom 2D physics engine from scratch, with collision resolution of various primitives, mass, elasticity, and spring joints. I created a sandbox with a set of tools to allow the user to experiment with the engine, allowing spawning of objects, making objects kinematic or dynamic, grabbing and moving objects, creating spring joints, deleting objects and speeding up and slowing down time. I also added in views that will colour objects based on velocity, mass or elasticity. This was a very informative project and taught me a lot about how physics engines work.
Project: Github
Open Haus
Open Haus was a VR group project I worked on where you work for a moving company and have to arrange and set up furniture within a time limit. I primarily worked on the scoring system for placing the furniture in the correct places, making editor tools for the designers to set up custom tolerances for the target positions with visual representations of the score falloff.
Working in VR brought a whole new set of technical limitations to work around, with trying to prevent motion sickness, and allowing a good range of movement based on physical controls. Moving large physics props in VR provided another set of challenges with balancing freedom of movement while not clipping through the camera, and simulating weight for heavier objects.
The combinations of unique challenges VR development brings were very interesting to solve, and it was a great learning experience.
Salvage
Salvage is an asteroids remake I made to learn cross platform development and later dynamic audio integration with FMOD.
Developing for multiple platforms, in this case mobile and PC was an interesting challenge, creating control schemes that work with widely varied input methods. While the PC controls use the keyboard primarily, the mobile controls use a virtual joystick and buttons. Making sure the game was optimised enough to run on mobile was also a challenge, limiting the scope of what could be made.
I also implemented a custom audio package I made that utilises FMOD, to allow for easy to use dynamic audio. It manages sound events, can control parameters over time, exposes events and parameters to unity’s event system and animator and can manage audio busses.
This project is one of my main testing sites for new techniques, and will probably be updated further in future.
The Devils Cookbook
The Devils Cookbook was the game I worked on for major production at AIE. It was a 15-week group project, with a team of 4 artists, 3 designers and 3 programmers. It is a single-player 3D top-down cooking game in which you’re trapped as the cook in a demonic kitchen, fighting against impatient patrons and aggressive ingredients.
I had multiple responsibilities in this project, from developing the cooking system and appliances, to the players inventory and the summoning of ingredients. At the start of the project, the programmers worked as a team to produce detailed UML diagrams for the architecture of the project. The project was mostly run asynchronously, and a lot of it was data driven.
My other responsibilities included the shop, loadout system and audio implementation. I also learnt some technical art for this project and created all of the final spell VFX.
This project was a lot of fun to work on, and I learnt so many new techniques.
Trailer: Youtube
Developer Commentary: Youtube
Game Download: Itch.io
