Thomas Phillips

A Game Designer and Certified Expert Unity Programmer Presents:

A collection of things I have made that I like

Third Power:

Level Designer

In my spare time while at Absolutely Games I contributed levels and brainstormed story beats for the puzzle stealth platformer, "Third Power"

Absolutely Games:

Programmer

I worked with Absolutely Games for a year and a half on a fresh, new, very NDA IP with some amazing people!

Absolutely Games | Home

Hunter:

Writer/ Designer

A piece of interactive fiction about the experiences of a hunter in early America as winter draws in, inspired by period diaries and my own walks through the woods.

(Click on the title or the image or here to play the demo)

Roadtrip:

Writer/ Designer/ Programmer

An infinite runner with a short, branching story, multiple level types and unobtrusive audio ads playing diegetically on the phone mounted to your car's dash.

Currently available for free on Google Play!

I've also included a design post mortem here

Cold Paradise:

Design/ Programming Consultant

Cold Paradise is an AI driven, emergent narrative/ simulation game about surviving as a robot in a post-human world.

Throughout the project, I was contacted for my input on the design and systems of the game and finally cuminating in being taken on full time to increase the framerate on lower end machines.

Campfire:

Writer/ Designer

I designed my own Tabletop RPG that better suits my style of DMing. It's incredibly simple and can be played with nothing more than two d8s and a few sheets of paper. The average time to learn it is under an hour, even for complete newcomers to tabletop roleplaying.

My goal was to take the typical roleplaying game experience and convert it to the same level of time commitment as a board game. If you'd like to play a session, let me know!

An incredibly simple roleplaying systemigd.itch.io/campfire-rpg

BBF or DIE:

Programmer

I was part of the team that took "BBF or Die" to AirConsole. The port focused on heavy optimisation of all aspects of the game.

AirConsole is an android/ web based platform and "BFF or Die" was originally developed for PC and Console The team took the framerate from single to triple digits; a heck of an achievement!

Inn Trouble:

Designer/ Lead Programmer

A chaotic, competitive, first person tavern running game mixing the silly player interactions of Sea of Thieves with the panicked rush of Overcooked.

I was the sole programmer on the project, working closely with our artists, designers and animator.

Inn Trouble went through four main iterations as we refined the idea, trying to create a demo that captured the feeling we wanted. The video to the right, on the top is from the third iteration when we took it from couch co-op to single player in an effort to nail the second to second gameplay before reintroducing the multiplayer while the bottom right is from the first iteration with the multiplayer still present but with significantly less polish.

UE4 Game Dev Lecturer

I accepted a position at Noroff University in Norway, teaching second year game development using Unreal Engine. I still keep in touch with some of my old students.

Automation Tools for Autodesk Revit

Working at Ryder Architecture I wrote custom code to extend their primary tool: Autodesk Revit. I attracted the attention of the Autodesk Revit software team who wanted to write an article about what I was working on as it was a significant time saver!

CIO:

Lead Programmer

A short, narrative puzzle game about a naïve nature spirit escaping a storm made in UE4.

I was responsible for the codebase and directing the two other programmers on our team: defining best practice, documenting the project architecture, assigning tasks, removing roadblocks and signing off on work.

Undercurrent:

Technical Designer

I created additional mechanics for the existing Undercurrent Demo, a VR title about piloting a submarine.

Zero G:

Level Designer

I was contracted by 20 Credit Games to create levels for their scifi action/ puzzle game about navigating an abandoned space station and collecting the parts you need to fix your ship.

Don't Look Down:

Designer/ Programmer

"Don't Look Down" is a relative gravity ball game. Each player has their own, local gravity that they have complete control over, allowing them to decide which surface they consider "the floor". The objective of the game is to retrieve the ball from the centre of the maze-like map and throw it into your goal. If you see the other player, you can "tag" them to force them to throw the ball immediately.

The result is a gymnastic, fast paced scramble for the ball where the person who can bend their brain to match their constantly shifting local gravity will come out on top! Or is that the bottom?

I had great fun designing the levels for this game!

Dynamic branching dialogue:

Writer/ Programmer

I created a dialogue system that allowed you to end or re-join the conversation at any point. It wouldn't pull you into a specific camera position but rather allowed you to continue playing as normal, occasionally offering up timed choices of what to say next. Failing to pick within the time limit was also a choice, allowing you to deliberately create awkward silences or give the impression you weren't listening.

If you walked too far away from the speaker, they'd transition to a farewell branch of their dialogue and the conversation would be interrupted. If you returned later on, they would remember that you'd walked off and start the conversation back up again. The subject being discussed would be resumed naturally using a bespoke reintroduction branch for each topic that varied based on that character's current disposition. You could feel characters becoming more and more annoyed at you!

Certain conversation topics could also alter the disposition of the person you were speaking to and leaving in the middle of their sentence would significantly decrease their disposition. If they didn't like you any more, they would refuse to talk to you. I was very proud of the robustness of the system and how natural it felt to interact with the characters!

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