Demonstrating my work on smaller solo projects and small-team projects, this page focuses on Global Game Jams games from 2011 to 2016, and Flash games made in Flash CS4 and Stencyl from 2010-2012.
Global Game Jam – Stencyl (collaborations) – Flash CS4 (solo projects)
Global Game Jam
I participated in these four Global Game Jams at the USC campus location, working solo or with small groups to make a playable game during the 48 hour event. They were fun times and good practice to collaborate and come to a consensus before rapidly executing the game.
2016 – Disruption
This is a solitaire game featuring cards and dice, where the player splits the A-10 cards from a 52-card deck into a few different decks which represent enemy encounters and the allies a player can draw and summon. Enemies must be defeated by both the luck of the roll and the luck of the draw.
Disruption is available here: https://www.reesehollandgames.com/disruption-ggj-2016/
This was meant to be a design to test mechanics for a card game that uses dice for additional values as part of the design. Red cards valued at A-10 represent the enemy encounters, fought one at a time for the first 5 battles, then two at a time for the second 5 battles. Black cards A-5 represent allies that can be summoned once drawn, and three can be traded in for a greater summon from the 6-10 deck. The player uses 2d6 or a combination of dice and allies to defeat each of the encounters, where the dice and summoned card total must be greater than the encounter total. Three player defeats will end the game, as the player failed to disrupt the enemy ritual. 10 wins means the player has succeeded. I made this solo, rather than working with a team.
2014 – Flatform
This is a two-player arena game with mixed perspectives, where one player’s character is represented with a bird’s eye view and resists gravity, while the other is represented from a side profile view and jumps across surfaces. To win, a player must score 3 goals or 3 kills.
Flatform is available here: https://globalgamejam.org/2014/games/flatform
This was game developed with an extremely small team, using a feature I’d thought about in the past, which was a collaborative or cooperative space where one player walks on the background as if it is a bird’s eye view, while the other has gravity and platforming on what would otherwise be the walls for the bird’s eye player. We went with a competitive game, where players must score 3 goals or defeat the opponent 3 times, dodging background fall-thru traps and platforming floor spikes to cross each other’s paths and get to the goal. The platformer attacks in an arc leftward or rightward, where the bird’s eye character attacks in the four cardinal directions. The initial concept design I sketched in my notebook ended up being what we used for the gameplay arena.
2012 – Ophiuchus
This is a single player game where the player clicks on the screen to send out shockwaves from that point, which control the path of a ball so it can destroy bricks from the rings arranged in a circular pattern.
This game was developed with a small team, taking the Ouroboros image as the inspiration, and applying a sort of radial Arkanoid concept I pitched. There were a few iterations we went through for how to utilize the snake eating/regurgitating itself for the imagery of the game, and ended up using it mostly as a threat in the final level. Aside from the concept and design, I created unique music and sound effects for the game.
2011 – Single Player Game
This comedic anti-dating game is designed around the idea of a player-controller protagonist who woos someone into a relationship, immediately falls for someone else, and is soon after angrily chased by their vengeful exes as they try to charm the next attractive single person they see.
I contributed by making sound effects for the project, as well as recording VO content from members of the team, but in the end we chose to keep it more retro and leave out the VO content. This team was well-staffed with a large group–for a game jam–of talented engineers, artists, and a fantastic composer, making for an extremely polished product by the end of the jam. Post-GGJ, one of the engineers enabled for players to choose the gender of their hero and their desired attractions to add a layer of inclusion to the game.
Stencyl
Both of these projects were made with the aid of an artist, but otherwise audio and gameplay were developed solo by me. I enjoyed switching to Stencyl from Flash CS4, as the snap-together coding allowed me to avoid syntax errors and make better use of other programming features which I hadn’t used as much in Flash CS4.
2012 – Shut Down CISPA
This is an endless boss battle SHUMP where the player must summon allies and avoid powerful shots from the dreaded CISPA satellite in order to bring the massive health bar down to nothing. Win or lose, this led players to sign anti-CISPA petitions.
I worked with an artist to design the CISPA satellite and some of the other art, and put links to three anti-CISPA petitions which could be found online at the time. The game featured three states of difficulty and activity for the boss, where patterns become more difficult, and deploy faster until they start to overlap one another. The player is able to spend points on upgrades to their own ship, as well as summoning and upgrading their surrounding allies and allies patrolling back and forth to assist in damage-dealing efforts and help shield the player from some attacks. This also featured three shot types–bullets, lasers, and fireballs–which could be leveled up two times to increase their size and damage output. This was released on Newgrounds and Kongregate.
2011 – Ninjew Saves Hanukkah
This is a combined platformer, bird’s eye, and Space Invader type game all rolled into one, featuring Ninjew’s efforts to save the holiday realm of Hanukkah from the Holiday Snatchers.
Collaboration with an artist was important in making the game look better, as well as establishing the use of a perspective where the same 2D character assets look good moving in the bird’s eye views and the platforming view without any change between the two. This game was meant to be a rare entry in the realm of Hanukkah games, but was also meant to be somewhat odd and unique in its own charming way. While there were plans for bosses and much more content, I was learning Stencyl as we were making the game, and were already past Hanukkah by the time the game finally released, so we completed what we could and released it in that state. Each level has a bird’s eye, Space Invaders, and platforming type of section. This was released on Newgrounds and Kongregate.
Flash CS4
All of these games were developed 100% solo, without any outside assistance or work from others. Coding, art, music, and sound effects are my own original designs, nothing came from asset packs. While they are all somewhat rough around the edges, the focus was on learning Flash CS4 and building all of my development skills along the way.
2012 – Ultra Profanity Shooter
This game gets the player shooting down profane bombs dropped by the F-Bomber, while avoiding bombs for appropriate words, in order to save the town below from being torn apart by the profanities the bombs that otherwise release when shot out of the air.
This features five VO characters I recorded and edited myself, and while not extremely marketable, it makes pretty much anyone who plays it laugh early and often. This is the last game I made in Flash CS4 before moving to Stencyl, and I used it as a learning opportunity to expand my Flash skills and ability to affect modular changes to vector art through code. I designed the art for each bomb to expand for longer words, and compress for shorter words, rather than creating one of each bomb for each word as a set of sprites. I had a great time doing all the audio and VO, and the original track I wrote for it is my phone’s distinctive ringtone to this day. This was released on Newgrounds and Kongregate.
2011 – AudioLock
The goal of this game is for the player to get a cursory understanding of noise cancellation mechanics by attempting to use the AudioLock tool to perform high-stakes heists at facilities using the otherwise-secure audio-based locking mechanisms.
This is the first noise cancellation game I’d ever seen, and likely one of the rare few ever made. This game teaches the player to use pitch, phase, and amplitude to cancel one or two noises at a time, and most of the visual design of the game revolves around the features and components of the AudioLock device. The UI is designed in a way where there are also visual cues for solving puzzles, so a player who is hard of hearing could also complete it by observing the noise display screen. This was released on MochiGames. Fonts in screenshot were properly aligned in earlier versions of Flash player.
2011 – Dual Input Gallery
Dual Input Gallery is a 30 level shooting gallery, expanding on Dual Input Defender by using the same coordination-building dual color crosshair driven by a keyboard and a mouse to shoot targets on the screen and clear them.
Unlike Dual Input Defender, each shooting gallery level is the same static level every time, aside from the randomized “Infinity Mode” that isn’t a numbered level itself. Another break from Dual Input Defender’s design is that all purple targets have to be hit by both crosshairs, and shooting a red or blue target with the wrong crosshair makes it Purple and diminishes the total points which can be earned for the level. Every level, and Infinity Mode, tracked the players score for that content, and provided a top score which is the sum of all earned scores for the MochiGames scoreboard–since that is where it was published. It also has original sound effects and six audio tracks.
2010 – Dual Input Defender
This is a coordination-building game which is designed with players using keyboard and mouse to drive a red and a blue crosshair, which are blasting red, blue, and purple targets along 3 paths to defend the forcefield-protected bases while the region’s evacuation is underway.
Unlike Dual Input Gallery, hitting a target with the wrong color is not penalized, so players could hit overlapping targets without any fear of penalty. Each of the paths has areas where they facilitate intersections, and it is key for the player to utilize those for maximum efficiency. This also has a short-term powerup called Double Purple, which allows the player to take out targets completely with either crosshair. This was released on MochiGames, and post-release I started rolling out a new a prototype to expand on the initial release.
2010 – Somewhere Between 1 and 1,000,000
This is a simple game I designed by making a larger version of a number-guessing game, where players need to figure out an exact number between 1 and 1,000,000 by putting in numeric entries and getting feedback on whether the target is higher or lower than the entry.
This is my very first published solo game, and while I meant it to be a simple game that I could use to verify the hookup of the MochiGames API, it was extremely popular and earned me my first indie developer dollar. It takes 1-3 tries per digit, and a good score is 14 or less. Due to the game’s small dimensions, the ads that were offered on MochiGames were very minimal and went quickly, so repeat plays were much faster than all of my other published games.
Adobe Air
I only did one tiny project in Adobe Air, as the Flash CS4 project I meant to use could not be easily ported, so this was completed in just a few days.
2011 – Tablet Tuning Fork
This is an app I created using Adobe Air for the Blackberry Playbook tablet. It is designed for their offer to developers to make an app for the Playbook and receive one for free. While simple in design, it is a functional tuning fork which allows the user to tune their instruments or compare their pitch to a certain tone.