Scotty Hoag
Programmer Portfolio
 
scotty.hoag@gmail.com  (209)-298-2622
NES Mug


Demolition Zone
September 2018 - Two Bit Circus - Midway Game

Grab the wrecking ball and throw it at the building to cause damage to the building and score points. Hit powerups like explosive charges to blast out entire floors, or wrenches to repair your opponent's building. Watch out for wildlife and other demolition workers: Hitting them will cost you points. And keep your feet planted, because each time you hit the building you will feel the ground beneath you shake with our force-feedback rumble floors.

I wrote most of the game code, including Unity C# scripts for the players, collision physics, gameflow, and scoring. I even designed and implemented a procedural level creation system to randomly arrange pre-built building floors from level designers into a full, random skyscraper that is unique each game. That also includes building tools in Unity for designers to create the level chunks with.
   
Box Art

I also wrote some hardware communication systems. First, we have force-feedback rumble floors that shake every time a building is hit with appropriate levels of intensity based on the damage done. I used Unity's 5.1 surround output to control and direct audio output to subwoofers bolted to the player stall positions to make this work.

As for ball detection, we have a sensor program I helped write in Open Frameworks and C++ that reads data from a LIDAR sensor and then outputs that to the game via OSC. Honestly, the hardest part of this was just getting Open Frameworks to run on Windows.

Last, I wrote automated scripts that are capable of playing the game at speeds significantly faster than human testers as a way for QA to run overnight tests to hunt for tricky bugs like memory leaks.

...Oh, and I make a cameo in the attract mode video. ;)




Check out actor Jack Black playing the game with his son!