Before the Sun Rises is a bullet hell style game set during the medieval witch hunts. Your sister, a presumed witch, was taken from her bed during the night and set to be burned at the stake. It is up to you to move and dash to your sister Bridgid, evading the mob as they try to stone you on your path.

I developed this game with Natasha Spinelli. We followed Situational Game Design theory to ideate and develop the game over the course of 4 weeks. I was responsible for the programming while she handled asset creation. We collaborated on the game and narrative design. All the visual assets in the game are 100% original.

Tools

Godot, GD Script, Maya, Substance Painter

We wanted to do an action game inspired by some of our favorite Hack and Slash games. We thought an Isometric style was the most achievable style of such a game, but we narrowed the scope of the game to focus on movement and dodging give to the feeling of thrill without a full combat system.

This project taught me the importance of clear communication and understanding the full 3D asset integration pipeline by working directly with a 3D artist.

Created in response to the zeal surrounding artificial general intelligence (AGI), Parousia is an explorable virtual environment set in a Gothic church converted into a data center. Server racks replace the pews, cables flood the floor, and the air hums with fans and machine beeps. The building runs a single altar: a disheveled cross of CRT televisions, enshrined by a mass of wires, showing images of Christ generated by AI in real time. Parousia serves as a cultural observation on how alike the thirst for a savior has become across faith and technology. Some await AGI as a second coming, while others preach it will end the world. Meanwhile, people turn to chatbots for confession. Some, in a state of psychosis, venerate them as prophets, their delusions affirmed by a machine that feeds them what they want to hear. Where does faith end and delusion begin? Jaafar and Spinelli draw on our long cultural fascination with machine consciousness and question why we look for divinity in what we build. Visitors are invited to wander among the servers and contemplate what they are waiting for.

Tools

Unreal Engine 5, Blender, Maya, Python, ComfyUI

Team Members

Natasha Spinelli: Design and 3D modelling of the cross centerpiece

Ringo WorldStarr is a looping level showcasing a bunch of animations and environments which are fully procedurally generated. The experience has you walking inside a torus which is pulsating, morphing, and shifting hues in a psychedelic manner.

The morphing shapes are math functions, where every point is a cube, animated by using time as an input. I wanted to make something psychedelic and mesmerizing to walk through. Theres 6 different functions/shapes here changing dynamically. With up to half a million particles animating in real time, the experience can be played at high framerates with no issues on modest hardware.

This project was the product of an independent study into visual shader authoring, focusing on the transition from CPU-based logic to GPU-driven compute shaders within Unity and Unreal Engine. By deconstructing mathematical surfaces—specifically the parametric geometry of the Torus—the study explored how low-level HLSL and buffers can be used to create high-performance, procedural environments.

Tools

Unity, ShaderLab