who am I

My name is Kyle Edwards and I am currently a student of Staffordshire university in there games computer programming course and during my time in this course so far I have made serval games. Some of the games used unreal and some also used unity and one was made in the windows command line. I have also done work in computer science which taught me how AIs move though an environment and what practices should be used to keep code fast.

I also went to stoke on tent collage where I also made plenty of games as well. I also excelled in the work I got here so much that I got a lot of free time which I channelled into a lot of side projects. Some of the side projects became very important to me and to others but some I were not able to finish despite butting in all the work because of a unforeseen indecent.

As for why I chose to study the art of making games though code it mostly goes back to when I was a kid playing on my stepdads computer and on this computer I was introduced to Gmod and minecraft and though Gmod I discovered mods and then I wanted to make my own for both games and after making many of them I wanted to then figure out how games were made so I went to stoke college and rest was history.

the kind of person I am

I would like to think of myself as a kind, caring and compassionate person who also likes a laugh every, now and again and I would also like to think I am good in teams. I also really like, computers and making stuff for them whether that's making my own games, mods, steam mods or making my own coding language and I also like chicken nuggets and seals..

I have also been descried by others as smart, intuitive but questionative and generally an all around, good and slightly clumsy but funny person so I reckon if you are looking for someone to lift spirts I could be perfect for you..

what I hope for in life

what I specialize in

what tools I have use to make games or programs

my main qualifications

how to contact me

employment links

NND

NND or neural network disassembly is a script of sorts that I created in the lua coding language. It is designed to go though all possible combinations of inputs, if your using floats it will only go thougth them all to a certian level of detail, for a neural network and then it logs the output it got from the series of inputs it provided.

Once it has gone thought all combinations of inputs it will then try to write a program that will accomplish the same tasks as the neural network in a language of your choice but it will require you to provide it details about that language and it also will not work with all of them.

This tool is great because it will allow us to much better understand how neural network work and how they come to the conclusions and ideas that they do however this type of tool is still currently in its infancy so the code it makes isn't as good as it could be yet but it is a start.

The photo to the left shows how it interpreted a neural XOR gate into lua. A link to this system can be found here.

Table File Format

The table file format is a a file format I create for easier understanding and editing involving a collection of data. The file format has also developed into a really useful tool for storing collections of data, like files and folders, without any level compression which helps minimize risk of files corrupting and the extraction process is significantly more faster. How this file format works is it has a header the starts at a left bracket and ends at a right one, the header then contains three values per data in the format, the first one is location and name which is represented like a Linux directory and then the first and second value is the start and end locations of the data in the file subtracted by the header length. The header length is the distance between the two brackets.

Files in the Table(tbl) file format can only currently be interacted with though c++ at the moment and you can write maps, tress and all sorts in and out of it additionally the format has something call compaction which can be used to condense the files by removing pointless data.

Texual engine

Texual Engine is a game engine I started creating late last year but I ended up finishing it up this half way thougth this year. The engine is very similar to the source engine and unreal in some regards but the main catch to this engine is that everything (and I do mean everything) renders and dose audio though the standard windows command line which.

Beyond that the engine exactly uses a smilier structer to the source engines VMF for map files and value management but it is also uses component based system to that of unreal and the material system loosely supports some of the features unreal materials have including post processing.

The first image shown here show some of the engines post processing capabilities (which are also done though the windows command line) and to create the effect I had to run it though my equivalent of a source engine console. Thhe image bellow shows what the 2D test area looks like without any screen effects.

The source code for this engine can be found here on github.

Gravity shift combat

Gravity Shift Combat is another game I made for a university modual (Bespoke Platform Development) and this game is made for the Evercade exp. I this game you objective is to pretty much kill everyone in the room with you and you can do this though a combination of gravity shifting and firing energy balls at your foes and you can do that because you know magic.

the game is pretty short and it only consist of four levels but these levels can be quite the fun challenge to overcome especially in ultra hard difficulty on top of that all these levels. Apart from the levels however a lot of love went into making everything from the particle system to the damage system, in this game.

if you want to see all the videos I recorded while completing this game then click here and you can click here to see the dev form posts.

Note if you obtain my grade for this from the academic board it will be forty or forty three percent and this is because I thougth my computer submitted my work but it did not and I did not realize this until a lecturer contacted me about 4 days after the dead line for summation resulting in my grade being caped. The uncapped grade for the games work alone is nighty four percent and the total uncaped modual grade is 88.6 percent. Moral of the story get better internet and hope the summation portal is open a month ahead of time so something could of at least been marked without the cap.

Enchanted forest

Enchanted Forest is a game I made for one of my university moduals (c# scripting for game engines and the dev forms posts for that modual can be here) and in this game, your objective is to try and live for as long as you can as tanks shoot at you consistently but what makes this even harder is the AI director Omega.

Omega is a lot like the AI director from Left for Dead except our AI director has one task which is to come up with the best plans to kill you and it would be very good at this job but we limit its resources and wipe its mind at the start of every game but as you accumulate more points it will know more about your play style and it will slow get given more resources untill you reach 1500 points at which point it will have all the resources it can have.

The combat for this game is also really simple but well-liked. The combat consists of three weapons red, green, and blue. each of these weapons will also have a coasponding enemy type of the same color and if you use the right weapon for the right NPC you will get a critical damage point boost. Apart from that, there are also power ups that ethier increese your speed or health or they would give you a force field of protection addational the faster you went the slower everything else became and this made people feel like they were supper heroes.

This second photo on the left shows the power up forcefield and this forcefield can also bounce enemy projectiles off it as well as push aroud the tanks such as the blue tanks which can also be seen in the photo. These tanks will also try to flee from you when they have taken to much damage as well which is a nice little trait to them.

Cable connect 1 & 2

Cable connect is a set of games inspired the watch dogs hacking puzzles with a lot of the second game also improving up one the puzzles with new mini mechanics like node attachments that randomly spin the nodes around the node the attachment is attached to or node attachments that need a certain amount of power before the node it is attached to will do anything.

The game also comes with nice stylized 3D backgrounds and clear sound effects it is sadly a bit short but systems are in place that will allow me to make more levels in the future should I want to.

The second game (the first one was for a game jam and it isn't very good as team mates did not do there job) can be found here and the code for it (so others can learn how to make there own kind of electrical based game) can be found here.

Public AI

Public AI or pal as it is referred to as in the code is a system I made that allows you to create your own chat GPT like that is also more deterministic(controllable) and humanistic(emotional and epiphytic) then chat GPT AI could ever be. It can also run functions as well and use the result of thoese functions in it's responses which chat GPT could only recently do. This AI was also inspired by zagisa from a "chat with it" and kizan from "event[0]" which also means you can use it in video games (if you don't mind rewriting a bit of code to hook it it up to said game) should you want to.

public AI also now comes with a bunch of tools which allow you to insert/teach the AI a bunch of information really fast as well as teach it how to understand spelling errors, how to use synonyms and all theses tools can be found with the folder ToolsToEnhanceAI which is located within the public AI repository.

This project was originally inspired by some of the AI work I did at collage however this work is drastically different from the the 'chat with it AI' that I made in collage and it also works far better which is why this has no college tag.

Core engine public release

The core engine is a modafiyed version of the love 2d engine that supports systems like: entities, cameras, particles, hooks, timers, time logic and resource management (ie textures and sound files) out of the box.

The engine is also very special as it also comes with a loading system that allows for the engine to stream in all the entities and resources with an actual loading screen rather than just having a whitebox but something else that is very special about this game engine is that it uses a new type of ticking (by ticking I mean a function that you run every so and so seconds to get an endless-ish loop) and this new type of ticking is a lot like delta time except it doesn't give you a number to times the speed of objects by in order for the movement to be accurate instead it work a lot like delta time but inside of the tick function is some code that uses the delta time to determine if and how many time it should run another function and we use that as our tick function everywhere else.

This is all special because it will help a lot of people who are just getting started with love 2d like game engines who are a bit unsure on how to do things like entities or resource managment.

I released the engine for public use this year and the source code for it can also be found here.

A chat with it

This year I worked on a game with brainstorm studios called "a chat with it", and in this game, you play as a human in the year 2030 stuck within a vacant city, with walls of unknown origin surrounding you and making it difficult to escape from this desolate, empty place.

To get out of the city you must communicate with an AI called Zagisa whose job is to oversee the city and ensure all is well and working but with his help he can unlock doors for you and answer questions you may have.

This project required be to work in a team and in this team my primary responsibility development of the AI and I also developed a level for the game after I completed the AIs development. My other team mates were responsible for making, materials, models, level and doing some of the code however I took the initiative in doing most of it. The AI that you talk to in this game is also also a lot like public AI except it was made in unreal but this cam at the cost of the AI being no where near as smart as public AI but despite this its still good at being a realistic chat bot that you can emphasize with. If you wish to see my dev log for this project click here.

Despite the AI being made in blue print some tasks were done in c++. The main systems designed in c++ were a new a new level loading system that could ensure all materials were loaded before letting the player play without us having to stream in the levels.

Lyra attack and defend

Lyra attack and Defend was a game I made for college with the Lyra game assets. in this game, you played on one of two sides (attacking or defending) in an attempt to capture or defend a set of points. if the time limit hit zero and not all points were captured blue wins likewise if all points were captured red would win but to make up for the fact that red would have to do a lot more work than blue (blue only has to keep one point to win) red dose have the advantage when it comes to the map.

the game also had classes which were the: healer, the dasher, the brute, and the bot class for bots.

The healer would have passive regenerative health and he could also create a ring of healing for his team to use. The dasher was made to be faster than the the other classes and they can also quick dash to places making it easier for them to get around the map and hold or defend a point while they wait for better support. The brute is a slower moving class but are also much harder to kill and they have the ability to make a force field of death.

the game was well liked my many of my classmates and you can click here (SOTC access only) to see the documentation of this work.

Dots

Dots is a programming language made by me and it is designed in such a manner where it can do a wide range of complex tasks and also run tasks almost simultaneously however the programming language is a bit complex to work with for most people. This coding language also uses dots (like full stops and bullet point dots) to run and execute tasks hence the name.

This coding language was also inspired by ascidots however it comes with a lot more features than acids such as functions for example.

Hide and shoot

Hide and shoot was another prototype of a game where you would of had to fend for you self in the dark against a threat with nothing more than a highly advance plasma shooting laser gun to keep you company.

The AI for this was also really advanced and had a really complexed system for seeking and finding players in the best way possible and I believe the game worked really well in how spooky it could be however I will say the audio could of been better and models as well. The AI was also constructed using unreal blueprint and it was constructed this way to minimize on the added complexity that comes with finding bugs in huge behaviour trees that span many files.

The subtitles in this games are also some of the best as they can change from one colour to another depending on how close you are to the sound.

Pin speed

Pin speed was a prototype of a game that worked a lot like a sonic game, where you gained speed by ramming into bad guys and there was a lot of parkour. This game had three levels to it which were simply called the grass, ice, and fire levels and all of these levels has all sorts of traps or bad guys that would try and kill you.

The game was well received by the people who played it and they did seem to enjoy it a lot as well.

Time traveling cube

This is a game I made where you use a combination of jumping, button pushing and time travel in order to solve tests and escape the underground lab known as z labs (it's shocking I know) but this basically works by using a sort of demo system but we can exclude objects from being affected from this playback. We also send the players movement demo data to another player like object which allows us to be able to see our past self in the game.

The game was also made using the love 2d game engine but I basically change everything in it and I do mean everything (even the crash screen) so that it would be to a standered I was happy with.

the itch.io link for game.

Gravity shift

Gravity shift was a game I made in collage one day when I got board after completing all my work so I deicide to tinker around with a game engien that was new to me ate the time and I created this as a result.

The game is an endless runner where you have to dodge these cubes called void cubes otherwise you would die and to dodge them you would generally do it by inverting gravity so you fall to the roof or back down to the ground and you can also dodge the void cubes by using one of the three power up that either destroy, shield or teleport you around them.

The game is not available for public download as everyone getting it would have to pay a licencing fee for the music and I wanted to keep the game free.