about me

Hi! Having recently completed my Aerospace Engineering Master's I have decided to change career paths and follow my passion of making games. I have worked on several games of my own and have also contributed to an open-source developed game. I have also included some of my work from my time at University.

phone

+44 77414 90038

email

joe@joefranks.com

voxel game

A procedurally generated open-world survival game that is clearly inspired by Minecraft. This began as a fun learning project that has gone on to become a serious long-term project that I would like to sell at some point. The goal of this game is to make a more gameplay-centric experience with greather emphasis on exploration, survival, and RPG elements.

World Generation

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A central design theme for this game is elements, which shall manifest through the world being divided into distinct regions, with each region being designed around a central element (earth, air, fire, water, light, dark, etc.). Each region is thousands of metres across and is divided into dozens of sub-regions (biomes). Biomes are selected to get more extreme as you get closer to the centre of a region. To use the planned "fire region" as an example, biomes placed on the outer edges may be charred woods or geothermal springs. However, as you move towards the centre of the region the fire theme gets more pronounced - from sulphurous acid lakes to sprawling volcanic wastelands to boiling lava lakes.

Region Noise Map

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Biome Map

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There are several advantages to using this approach, the first being how it facilitates the desired world design. Because of how cell noise is generated, it is very simple to determine the distance from any point to the centre of a biome, or the distance to any other biome. This means that very inhospitable biomes can be placed in the centre of each region while allowing players to safely traverse the outskirts of each region. Additionally, being able to find the distance to neighbouring biomes means that terrain generation can be made very smooth between different biomes, even if how the terrain generated in each biome is completely different. This means that each biome can be designed to be more distinct from each other. Lastly, as the approximate size and centre of each biome can be calculated this could become very useful when I implement more complex structure generation.

Other Photos

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G-Code Visualiser/Debugger

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mardek engine

An open-source remake of the Mardek games.

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Line Up

A simple, timed, puzzle game where upon completion the player selects a new rule to be added to the game.

Bullet Hell Boss Fight

Other Projects

These aren't games; however, I felt I should add a few examples of other work I've done. These are taken from my degree, two examples being aircraft I helped design and the other being from my Master's dissertation.

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