Games

Real Racing Next (Early Access) - 2022/23

Real Racing Next (Early Access) was a preview of a next-generation Real Racing title, with a new graphics engine, handling model and metagame. The early access release gave a glimpse of a small portion of the game, with nine cars across three locations.

For this release, I was the handling & car data designer for all vehicles, alongside its game modes.

Please click the thumbnail to view gameplay.

Real Racing 3 - 2014-22

I was the designer in charge of the “Event Archives” feature, which allowed elder players to access legacy content that was previously only available in earlier updates.

Featured Events and Limited-Time Series’ would appear dynamically based on the player’s current game progress, prioritising unowned vehicles that players had used in these events when they were active.

Additionally, I oversaw the implementation of Real Racing 3’s transition into a seasonal title, with a full main menu refresh to focus on that particular update’s content.

For this transition, I designed the battle pass structure, a free battle pass for each update where players earn bonus rewards for participating in limited-time events.

As a Designer on Real Racing 3, I predominantly created content over 33 Title Updates from the v7.3 update released in May 2019, through to v11.0, released in December 2022.

My speciality was creating the game’s “Featured Events”, a time-limited narrative-driven quest where players completed challenges to earn a car.

Featured Events required creating 20-30 individual races with bespoke AI opponent difficulty tuning, crafting in-race goals to complete and metagame tuning to meet Product Managers’ expectations.

Real Racing 3 Career Highlights include:

  • Authoring the First Flight featured event - the video game debut of the Aston Martin Valkyrie.

  • Authoring officially licensed Formula 1 Grand Prix content & balancing the F1 race car data to mirror real-world performance deltas.

  • Representing the Real Racing 3 Team at the Formula E New York ePrix in 2017; beating former Red Bull F1 driver Jean-Eric Vergne on stage in an esports event.

Game Jams

A few ‘highlights’ of the many Game Jams I participated in while at EA Firemonkeys.

Space Punch! - 2015

Space Punch was the result of a few Firemonkeys developers wanting to join in on the Global Game Jam festivities in Melbourne. I was the designer on a relatively large team for a GGJ event, with nine people contributing to the game.

The result after the weekend’s events was a whimsical multiplayer mobile game, where players took turns slingshotting astronauts towards an escape hatch.

The video capture is from a PC build, which did not include the touch screen slingshot UI elements present in the tutorial screen.

Monday Mourning - 2016

Most of the Space Punch crew stayed together for the following year, where the theme was “ritual”. I was a Designer & UI artist for this jam, where I created the game logo and tutorial content.

The intent was to jump on the popular “___ simulator” genre that exploded at the time with Goat Simulator, so we set out to make some humorous takes on regular morning tasks, such as turning off your alarm clock and pouring a cup of coffee.

The final result was a rather whimsical game with questionable physics and the ability to throw alarm clocks and cats without penalty.

Code Brown - 2018

The last of the Firemonkeys team Global Game Jam entries - with good reason, probably.

The GGJ theme was “transmission”, so several teams at the Melbourne site had the identical thought of a virus-spreading game. If only we knew what was to come a few years later.

(Note: If you’ve been viewing these GGJ titles in chronological order, it’ll look like we had all lost our minds over the years. You may be correct.)

Nonetheless, we went for a tongue-firmly-in-cheek approach to the subject matter, with a random generator for patient names, occupations and virus names. Players took control of patient zero, who had four dignified abilities that allowed them to spread their virus through a medical facility. Players had a time limit to infect all players, and were graded at the end of the session on their overall infection rate.

I reprised my role of Design/UI artist once again, creating all UI assets in a horrific Microsoft WordArt/Windows XP software gore aesthetic.