Introduction
Hi everyone! My name is David Mahany, I’m from West Islip, NY and I’m currently in my junior year pursuing a BS in Computer Science and a BS in IMGD. I’ve been interested in game development and programming for a long time, and art is of course tied into my interests. In this post, I’m going to talk about my background a bit and try to pick out some interesting things I’ve worked on in the past.
Art and Technical Experience
As far as experience in art goes, I would consider myself to be on the less experienced side. I’ve been interested in game development for a long time, but I have mostly focused on programming. I haven’t had much experience making art, especially things like drawing, though I’ve been trying to get more into it in recent years. However, I have had more experience in the area of technical art, like 3D modeling. Sometimes I also like to make small bits of music for game jams, personal projects, or just for fun, mostly using a music program called pxtone Collage and custom tools to extend the format/editor.
A bunch of my pxtone music can be found on ptweb. I also have a couple songs in Kero Rhythm Fan Arrangements, a fan album containing remixes of music from the game Kero Blaster.
I have a bunch of experience with several technologies related to this practicum. I’ve been working with Arduinos, electronics, and sensors since early high school on my school’s FIRST Robotics team. I also have a good amount of experience making projects with Raspberry Pi. Particularly related to this practicum, I also really enjoy playing around with electronic art and especially RGB LEDs. A good example of this is me and Slater‘s final project from IMGD/AR 3200 last year:
Inspirations
As a programming and game development major a lot of my inspiration comes from games I’ve played.
I like to think about there being two types of inspirational games for me:
There’s games where creating things inside the game is inspirational, like Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio, Satisfactory, etc.
There’s also games where the inspiration comes from the design, style, art, and/or music the game offers, including games like Hollow Knight, Celeste, Undertale/Deltarune, Cave Story, Hyper Light Drifter, and Noita, to name a few.
Game Things I’ve Done
During my freshman year at WPI, I wanted to become more used to using C++, and inspired by the release of Noita, I started making a custom engine in order to make a game. The idea is that it’s a 2D survival game based around a falling sand simulation, focusing on procedural generation. This is still my main project, though the engine is still far from complete. While I made a lot of progress, due to early architectural carelessness (ie. bad code), I slowly realized it would be very hard to continue development without a lot of major refactoring of the entire codebase. Instead of doing that, over this summer, I decided to completely restart development, this time making sure the foundation was solid, and also dropping C++ in favor of Rust because I wanted to learn it and thought it would be fun to work with (it is) and result in better code (it did). The first two gifs are from the old C++ version since I haven’t really put any art in the new engine yet.
To close off here’s some more demo videos from other small games I’ve worked on:
Inventive! I’m so intrigued by the falling sand survival game. It’s like Terraria meets Sugar, Sugar (if you also played that game as a kid). I love the funky colors in the new screenshot and the peek at the gameplay using the chisel. It looks like its going to be a really fun game with interesting game mechanics!
Striking. Your work goes to show that art takes many avenues and game development encompasses so many digital aspects of art. The music you’ve made is really good. The catfish game caught my eye because I’m a fan of eat-em-up games. As someone who has messed with 3D modeling for games I can tell that your 3d modeling is well done and that you’re on your way to making some great projects/games.
Dark. Although I wouldn’t necessary qualify most of your art as “dark” I really enjoyed the robot uprising piece and that had an underlying dark humor to it!
Thought-Provoking! I really liked the video you shared showing the robot uprising piece. It is clear that you put a lot of thought behind this piece and the time and effort shows. Good Work!
Quirky – I love the pixelated look to your game, and the featured image’s bright colors with the wavey fading lines on the dark background make it really visually captivating. Dapper Catfish looks like a game I would LOVE to play, the scenery is so beautiful!
Impressive! The robot overlord is funny and terrifying at the same time. I like the retro look of all your games as well.
thought-provoking, Your robot uprising art despite the humor makes me think about the robots and creations that I might make in the future.
IMPRESSIVE! I remember seeing the catfish game when you made it, and being impressed how much you accomplished in 48 hours – but all this other work is amazing! A game engine like the one you created seems like a huge undertaking… I’m in awe.
Clever! I really like that little train game — can you send it to me please or something? I’d really like to play that. I find it pretty cool that you’re doing CS stuff + music + art, and it would be so cool to see a combination of that in the future.
Impressive! I really liked the C++ version of Falling Sand Survival, and was amazed seeing how much work goes into making a game engine. I look forward to getting to try the new version in Rust! You still owe me a Steam key for it btw…
Impressive – As someone with very little coding and electronic knowledge, I found your “The Future Is Bad” video to be so impressive and cool. The way you manipulated the lights might be a mystery to me, but I still appreciate it.