Steve Marinconz
Game development portfolio
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 fortunate to be able to demo an early prototype for EGW 2021, and I'm continuing to develop this project in my free time.
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.I designed the electricity simulation to convey the feeling of how electricity really works without making the player understand Ohm's Law. I also created the level geometry and lighting. Playable here
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
Elf Thief omega
Conway's Game of Life video toy
As a design exercise, I wanted to make a puzzle game out of the Game of Life. The goal was to practice ideas for "gamifying" math concepts that aren't compelling to a general audience.I showed the work in progress at Bar SK in Melbourne, and to make it more entertaining for an event setting, I turned it into an interactive video toy inspired by analog VJ @liquidlightlab.
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 used Twine to prototype Imprint's level design, then I turned it into a standalone story for GDC 2021. Playable here
