This is the dissertation project developed at the end of the Computer Games Technology MSc at Abertay University (2019/2020). It is a mobile app that offers an alternative approach to AR, which allows the creation of a complete virtual map of an environment by using a single marker and a set of predetermined distances. This hybrid AR system does not rely on feature detection by the device’s camera, but uses the device embedded sensors, such as the accelerometer and the gyroscope, to achieve motion tracking and map well-known 3D spaces. The main goal of the project was to analyse whether this innovative approach to Augmented Reality would provide reliable results and could therefore be applied to various kinds of AR apps. A demonstration video of the app is available on YouTube.

This is the dissertation project developed at the end of the Computer Science BSc at the University of Catania (2018/2019). It is a Serious Game made for individuals, especially children, with learning disabilities. The app contains a set of games that offer various learning activities aimed at strengthening the players’ reading and writing skills. The game was made using the Unity Engine and SQLite to collect and analyse the users’ data.

Anima is a third person, puzzle adventure game that combines exploration and creative puzzle solving. In the game, the player will spend most of their time exploring dungeons, solving unique puzzles and collecting spirits to empower the player’s basic abilities. While most of the gameplay takes place inside dungeons, a world map could be used to help identify the locations of dungeons, treasures, secrets and side challenges. For more information visit Tranzfuser 2020 team page.

Amentia is a first-person puzzle game that immerses the players in a fantastic medieval world inhabited by creatures playing upon their sanity. The main character wakes up in the third floor of an ancient tower full of puzzles that the player needs to solve in order to escape. Monsters inside the tower can be very dangerous, as they will increase the player’s insanity whenever they get too close. Although reaching the highest level of insanity will cause death, being insane might help the player get through some of the obstacles that the tower presents.

Apocalypse Rush is a top-down survival shooter set in a desert of a post-apocalyptic world. This game was made in occasion of the Global Game Jam event in 2020, together with a team of three people. The theme of that year was “Repair”, and that’s why the focus of the game is to survive by continuously repairing the running vehicle. The peculiarity of the game is that the player's car eventually begins losing parts, both over time and because of the enemy shooting, therefore the player has to collect components from the enemy robots to fix the lost parts. Whenever the car loses all of its 10 components, the game ends and the players are given a score depending on the amount of time they survived. The game submission is publicly available on the GGJ2020 Webpage.

This prototype of a roguelike game presents a concrete application of advanced procedural generation techniques, which are used to create a simple dungeon crawler game. The project consists of a standalone 2D game in which the player has to navigate through procedurally generated dungeons in order to find a hidden treasure. Every dungeon is made up of several rooms and corridors that connect them. A Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) algorithm takes care of generating all the game elements by also making sure that every level can be cleared. Moreover, a collision detection system is implemented through a grid system and AABB (Axis-Aligned Bounding Box) in order to ensure that the player can only move within the dungeon rooms and corridors. Various post processing effects can also be toggled on and off by using different UI buttons.

Agar is a reproduction of the notorious homonymous game presenting a concrete application of network development in games. In this game, players can move around a flat 2D area to collect items and increase their score and size. Whenever two players collide, the bigger player will “eat” the smaller one causing their defeat. The game can host multiple players who will be playing one against the other as in a traditional free for all multiplayer game. Every player will have a consistent view of the game world and will always see the enemy players moving around the map as they explore the arena. The project presents a client-server architecture where the game server is responsible of emulating the game world and updating all the connected clients. Each client sends updates to the server at given intervals of time and manages to keep a consistent view of the game world by predicting data and interpolating the results with the values received from the server.

By reinterpreting a Unity tutorial, this project offers an application of the DDA problem which is solved by using two AI systems: Fuzzy Logic (FL) and Rule Based Systems (RBS). In the game, players must dodge and attack incoming enemies in order to gain points and survive for as much time as possible. While the game runs, the AI system evaluates the player’s skill level depending on various factors and adjusts the difficulty accordingly (reduces enemies spawned for each wave, decreases their speed and fire rate, …). The aim of the project was to show how different the two approaches are, by highlighting how the Fuzzy Logic system provides smoother transitions between the different levels of difficulty, while the Rule Based System is characterized by crisp shifts.

This Solar System Simulation represents a concrete application of the DirectX 11 tools. The project consists of a standalone navigable 3D scene reproducing the eight planets of our Solar System orbiting around the sun. All the elements in the scene are surrounded by a space themed skybox and are illuminated by a point light located inside the sun, which stands still at the centre of the scene. The camera can move around freely, allowing to explore the system and to lock on every single planet for a close-up. A particle system generates the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and a sound component plays a background theme during the simulation. All of the project features were created from scratch by using C++ and the DirectX11 toolkit.