Steve Marinconz
Technical game designer
Piece of Ship!
7dfps 2022 entry
Making a whole spaceship simulator in a week is a bit ambitious, but we went for it anyway. The result was a fun little game with weird gravity and a lot of fuses.We designed the ship systems to give the feeling of Han Solo running around his ship fixing things under fire. I worked on the systems design and also designed and implemented the level and lighting. The original jam version is playable here. I am currently working on an expanded version that I'm looking forward to sharing soon!
GORBS 3D
Gravity Orbs
I had to make a small gravity simulation for a job interview, and I ended up having so much fun with it I kept developing it into a sandbox webgame.
There aren't enough gravity sims in 3D, so I experimented with that. Fixing the camera to retain some of the simplicity of 2D, and adding a whole bunch of sliders for pizazz. Playable here
Red Light Green Light
Spooky experiment
I put together this small game in a week as a little side project when I was thinking about vision "based on movement", to quote Jurassic Park. I thought it would add a fun twist on the "liminal spaces" style of games that have been popular recently. You can only see things that move, and there are some folks wandering around for you to find (and avoid). Playable here
Imprint
Experimental gameplay workshop 2021
I'm fascinated with how living things perceive the world, and with alternative control schemes in games. Both of which are usually limited to very gimmicky portrayals in major media. Imprint is an exploration game that asks you to control multiple bodies at one time while only using two buttons. So the limiting factor is not your FPS skills, but your understanding of how brains perceive spaces. I was excited to be able to demo an early prototype at GDC in 2021.
Elf Thief omega
Conway's Game of Life video toy
I was learning Unity and looking for a project to work on, and I got really interested in fast algorithms for cellular automata. I turned it into an interactive video toy inspired by analog VJ @liquidlightlab. I exhibited the results at Bar SK in Melbourne in 2018. Playable here
Canine Assembly Line
It's just math (don't tell anyone)
I designed and programmed a small game about sorting algorithms to experiment with sneaking education into games.Who would need to sort things like a comparison algorithm? Colorblind dogs assembling color-coded parts, of course!
Winter Wars
iPhone shoot-em-up
A mad scientist is trying to end winter, and schoolchildren want to stop him in order to keep their snow days. He shoots them with a laser mounted on his roof.I designed the mechanics and did production planning through release, working with a programmer and an artist.
After seven years, Winter Wars was removed from the app store in the 32-bit purge. RIP.
Imprint (text version)
Twine story
I was using Twine to prototype Imprint's initial level design, so after I was done, I turned it into a small standalone story with a different tone. Playable here
Unity inspectors
Work smarter
I like to design systems-focused games, so there's always a lot of tweaking and balancing to do. As much as I understand the value of command lines and text files, working on anything with more than a small scope really benefits from visual tools.(GIF: A loot table editor I made using Odin Inspector)
Dragonspace
Visualization of spatial partitioning concepts
I programmed a library of well-optimized implementations of spatial partitioning techniques for use in Unity.Since I knew many other beginners get lost in the same rabbit hole, I also wrote an explainer and made an interactive demonstration of the different techniques for anyone else who had the same desire for a side-by-side comparison. Playable here | Code here
