Zoë Mode

Website

I worked at Zoë Mode as a programmer for five and a half years.

  • Zoë Mode focuses on making music and party games to be played in a social atmosphere.
  • In the past, flagship games at Zoë Mode have included the Eye Toy and SingStar series'.
  • All projects at the company are made using agile methodologies and SCRUM.

Crush3D

3DS (2012) C++

Homepage: English, Japanese | Metacritic | Buy | Video |

A remake of the original PSP version for the 3DS. Along with most of the original code team I worked on this, with my focus on:

  • Stereoscopic 3D
  • Improving the player input and movement
  • Streetpass design and implementation
  • Porting systems and some graphics routines from the PSP version

Zumba Fitness 2

Wii (2011) C++

Homepage | Metacritic | Buy | Video |

A game for the international dancercise phenomenon, Zumba Fitness. I worked on a lot of menus and buttons for this one:

  • Frontend
  • Localisation
  • Movement recording for data input

Grease

Wii (2010) C++

Homepage | Metacritic | Buy | Video |

In my short time on this project, along with bugfixing, I was tasked with:

  • Localisation
  • Frontend
  • Video Encoding and Playing

Chime

XBOX 360, PS3, PC (2010) XNA, C#

Homepage | Metacritic | Buy: XBLA, PSN, Steam | Video |

Chime passed through whilst I was working in The Lab, and changed significantly from an interesting toy into the game that was finally released. As the team was so small I was involved very closely with the designers, mostly working on:

  • Iterating quickly on gameplay and core rules
  • Particle effects
  • Other graphical effects

Disney Sing It: Pop Hits

Wii, PS3, PS2 (2009) C++

Homepage | Metacritic | Buy | Video |

A karaoke game with hit songs from Disney shows and bands.
For this project I was mainly involved in tools and scripts.

  • Build machine maintenance.
  • Game 'playing' tool for auto-testing of incramental builds
  • Creation of scripts to enable any team member to create builds and discs for any of the six SKU's when required.
  • Bug fixing on PS2 and PS3 and Wii.

The Lab (Zoe Mode Internal Prototyping Group)

PC (2009) C++, C#, Lua

A small team of five people, we were given single sentence briefs and tasked with creating and proving ideas within short timeframes, usually ony two weeks.

During this time, we experimented not only with gameplay and presentation ideas, but also with alternative programming languages and APIs, including XNA, SDL and OGRE, FMOD and WWise, we even wrote a Lua scripting interface for a micro-game collection.

Of the five games created during this time, so far only Chime has been publicly announced.

Unreleased Game

XBOX 360, PS3 (2008) C++

For the short period I was involved in this game, I was building upon Rock Revolution's crowd animation system.

  • This time was used as an experiment into the benefits and issues of pair programming.
  • The main improvements of our new system were avatar-object and avatar-avatar interaction.
  • We focued particularly on ease of use for artists, both in external tools and in the in-game editor.

Rock Revolution

XBOX 360, PS3 (2008) C++

Homepage | Metacritic | Buy | Video |

A rhythm action game for Konami USA.
I was involved in the following aspects:

  • Graphical R&D, including shadows, projected images, particles, lasers and research into 3rd party effects tools
  • In game art tools for tweaking and viewing shader and full screen effects
  • Gameplay, front-end and menu programming

Crush

PSP (2007) C++

Homepage | Metacritic | Buy | Video |

A puzzle platform game with a small team, meant that I was involved in a wide variety of areas of code, including:

  • Graphics, animation and effects
  • Player input and movement
  • Enemy programmed-intelligence
  • Debug menus and in-game design tools