TJ Larson

That Damn Goat

Compete against your friends while running from a maliciously inclined goat! That Damn Goat is a splitscreen multiplayer party game developed by a team of students at RIT, lead by a team of RIT faculty for PC and Switch. In this game, players compete in a variety of gamemodes across a variety of maps, all while a goat does everything in its power to create chaos amongst the players. For this project my role was sound designer, composer, and QA analyst, responsible for creating sound effects and music for the project, as well as implementing audio assets through Wwise. As a QA analyst, I was responsible for checking incoming merge requests to make sure that new updates worked as intended as well as not breaking any other element of the project, both on PC and Switch.

Soundwave Song Upload Webserver

This project during my time in a Rich Media Web App Development class at RIT. In this project, I was tasked to use express.js to create an interesting and engaging web app along side React.js for the front end and using MongoDB as the database for the back end. The website I created was designed to be a web app where a user could create an account and, using this account, upload songs of there own and like the songs of other users. Even when not logged in, visiters could browse the homepage, search for songs and users on the site, and view other users profiles. If I were to take this project further, my first goal would be to convert the whole web app into a single page application. This has many advantages both in terms of server organization and how the information gets displayed, but the biggest goal this step would lead to is creating an audio bar at the bottom of the page that continues to play the audio file the user selected to play even when switching from the homepage to a user's page. After that, I would start looking into improving the bios of the user to allow a user to create a more personalized page as well as additional features such as playlists, uploading multiple songs as albums, etc. Finally, I would want to take another deep look at the styling for the whole website and see what steps I could take to improve how the view is presented to a user.

Link To Website

X-Wing Squadron Builder

This was a project I made while in IGME 430, learning NodeJS and the HTTP library. This website is a squadron creator for the board game X-Wing Tabletop Miniatures, a game where players take turns piloting a squadron of ships from the Star Wars universe trying to out-dogfight their opponent. This website lets users create a new squadron and edit the pilots inside of that sqadron.The data I am using comes from a NPM package, linked here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/xwing-data This data is stored for half an hour, as after half an hour the webserver restarts and at this point we had not learned how to use a database.

Link To Website

Ao Shu Spellslinger

Travel through an ancient china impacted by the discovery and development of arcane alchemy. Ao Shu Spellslinger is an isometric action-adventure developed by a team of students from RIT and the Art Center College of Design in California. In the game the player explores the magically altered landscapes of China and utilizes the tools that came about from the introduction of alchemy to fight back against those who would use this new power for nefarious purposes. I was a programmer on this team, whose sole focus was on developing the player controller and the aspects related to that, ranging from movement to combat to interactions with elements in the environment.

Link To Demo Video

Dance Dodge

Dance and dodge your way through incoming projectiles for as long as you can. Dance Dodge was the final project for Rich Media and Web App Development 1 class I took in the fall of 2021. This project makes use of the canvas and audio elements native to HTML and uses them to create a bullet hell game. The game uses the audio element to play the background music and to create bars along the top and bottom of the canvas element to represent the lanes of fire. The fetch API is also used to load in information pertaining to the difficulty of the game.

Tiny Little Files

Blast your way through waves of enemies and stop Victor Sells from violating the laws of magic! Tiny Little Files is a game set in the world of the Dresden Files, done by a team of 5 members. Tiny Little Files is a bullet hell game, where the player must fight their way through waves of enemies using two different weapons: a revolver and a blasting rod. To win, the player must defeat Victor Sells, the main villain behind this story and an evil sorcerer to boot.

Tiny Little Demons

Solve puzzles to summon demons and appease your clients. This project takes place in the world of Ethshar, developed by a team of 5 members. The player is a demonologist trying to summon demons, and as such in order to summon demons the player must complete the ritual. In this game, the player will place ingredients to fill the outline of a given shape. Placing all of the ingredients into the outline without touching any of the lines results in the player successfully summoning the demon.

Book Search

Search for your favorite books or see what books other people are reading! This app was the first project for my Rich Media Web App Developent 1 class and had us using multiple new tools and concepts. This app makes use of the Bulma library and Google's Books API to create and app that we and other users would find an actual use for. This website uses Google Books API to search for books and allows for users to save these books to two different lists, based on whether they have read them or not.

Tiny Little Kingdoms

Tiny Little Kingdoms is a 2 to 4 player strategy game set in the world of Ethshar. It takes inspiration from games like Risk with its mechanics of moving armies across the world board and Inis with a drafting phase of special cards. The game round takes place over 3 phase: drafting, planning, and execution. During the drafting phase players select a card from a pile before passing that pile onto the next player. Then players will place the cards they collect in a specific order during the planning phase, which determines the order they are used in during the execution phase.

Othello

Play the classic game of Othello, place your pieces and outsmart your opponent to have your color the most prevalent on the board. Othello is the third project I worked on for Intro to Game Web Tech and was my first experience using Pixi.JS and howler.JS. This site allows for two people to play through the game of Othello, with players placing tokens on the board trying to flip other tokens to their color.

MTG Card Search

Search for your favorite cards from Magic: The Gathering and save them for your reference! MTG Card Search was the second project I worked on for Intro to Game Web Tech and served as my first foray into using APIs, namely the Magic: The Gathering API. Using this site you are able to search for cards from Magic: The Gathering using multiple parameters and save them to local storage for easy return access.

Ukulele Model

This is a 3D model I made in the fall of 2020 for 3D Animation and Asset Production class. I used a ukulele in my house as a reference and did the modeling, UV unwrapping, and applying textures to them in Maya.

Error 404

Error 404 is a class project that I did in a team of 4 during my Game Development and Algorithmic Problem Solving class in the Spring of 2020. It is a 2D platforming game where you, the player, are trying to traverse the level and reach the opening at the right edge of the screen while collecting coins and dodging spike traps. My focus in this project was to design and test the levels in the game and to develop the code used to save and load the level design into the game. This is also my first ever finished game!