Angel B. Smith(they/them) is a young creative with an interest in game development, technology, and programming. They enjoy playing Tabletop Roleplaying games, playing guitar, and streaming in their free time.

They graduated from Quincy High School in 2019 with a Certificate of Occupational Proficiency in Design and Visual Communication and was fully Adobe Certified. They went on to attend Eastern Nazarene College from Fall 2019 to Fall 2024 and graduated with an Associates in Technology and Outstanding Graduate award, majoring in Information Technology.

They worked for the IT Department at Eastern Nazarene College from Spring 2020 to Spring 2021 and helped deploy and configure equipment and service customers at the help desk.

After a short break to focus on school, they participated in a Summer Research group dedicated to teaching students how to develop VR applications using Unity and Meta Quest 2. The project had five students, three of which had no experience with Unity, VR, or programming. Angel became the project lead and helped teach the students the new skills and programs. They also ran the morning standup meetings, planning poker, and burndown charts.

They went on to work as a Lab Technician for the Computer Science, Physics, and Engineering departments from Summer 2023 through Spring 2024. During this job, they repaired and maintained equipment such as power supplies and 3D printers. They also configured and maintained all lab computers in the departments, organized and managed stock, and assisted students with any assignments or projects they were working on.

During the same period, they were a co-founder of the Shrader Club, a club focused around technological career development, group projects, and research. They helped create and run the club, as well as led most of the events such as public game tournaments, free training, and homework help sessions.

This project was focused on 2D noise and terrain generation in the Unity engine. It was started December of 2021 and was meant to be the beginnings of a much larger project(Startrotter) that was later abandoned. During this project we used basic Perlin noise to create simple terrain. Unfortunately, the project files were lost but many images were saved. The following is a timeline of the development of this project.

This was the first successful generation of noise, which was mapped to a texture file as the voxel system hadn't been implemented yet.

After some tweaking, that code created this terrain texture.

After about a week of pain and creating systems that would never be used, we finally implemented the voxel “engine” and created this first generation with actual voxels.

Then we got these two generations in the voxel engine. At this point, we added rigidbodies to each voxel to allow for a player character.

These two images show some tweaked values and the delicate balance that is required in this method of generation.

We began experimenting with material layers but it's a little hard to see. There are layers of dirt, gravel, and stone within the generation. Also, we added robot character that can run around and modify the terrain.

At this point, I was getting busy with. school so I could only finalize the cave generation. These images show the process of finding the proper size and texture of caves.

At last, we get to the final test with terrain for over a year and the last image I could find of our 2D voxel engine. We leaned toward a more walkable cave model as well as an multi-octave generation model for the surface noise. We added some alternate materials around the edges of the caves and varied the surface thickness.

There are no further updates to this project as the project was postponed indefinitely due to scheduling issues. As stated earlier, there are no viewable files associated with this project.

'Cyber Flow' was a class project which was meant to show a student's ability to create a game from start to finish. It required us to follow the basic design and development phase structure; design document, development timeline, prototyping, and polishing. The game focused on parkour and FPS elements with the working name “parkour shooter.” This was humorously changed to “parkour dispatcher” due to the school's “no violence” policies. Below is a timeline of the project:

The first step was creating a design document for the project. Above is screenshots of the design document I created(file download). Unfortunately, the design sketch was submitted physically and lost.

After my design document was approved, I was tasked with creating a Scrum board with Trello, including a burndown chart(not pictured). https://www.pigpigcreative.com/w/lib/images/toolbar/linkextern.png

By the end of the project, I had implemented wall-running, grappling hook/swinging, a dash ability, FPS shooting, and prototype AI enemies. I may continue this project in the future to add more levels and refine several mechanics but as it stands now, I am proud of this project as a prototype. Unfortunately, I can't find any 'in progress' screenshots but I took some new screenshots of the project. The project itself is also available for download here.