Shelley Lowe

As part of the League of Geeks team, I'm in charge of creating new UI for Armello, a digital board and card game set in a beautiful grim fairy tale fantasy world. My primary role involves implementing new UI features to a high level of polish whilst championing world-class UX practices across all our products. This includes using a variety of different tools (tweens, animations, particles, audio, etc) to create UI that looks and feels good. As well as the in-game implementation, this role also involves collaboration with designers and artists to assist in designing the UI flow and ensure the overall user experience is as smooth as possible.

Armello (2015) | Steam, PS4, XBox One, iOS, Android, Switch

I joined the Scarlet City team at the beginning of 2015 to work on The Aetherlight, a steampunk inspired online game which aims to educate kids about the Bible. My role as a gameplay programmer involved developing various game features (Unity client side and any server side requirements) as well as in-house Unity editor tools. I helped with the project up to the Early Access launch in January 2016.

Examples of work include:

• Integrating the in house custom "action" system with Cinema Director to help simplify the set up of action scripts on props and allow cutscenes to be created using existing systems.
• Created a loot table system to allow designers to specify item rewards with corresponding weights to help with balancing of items and battles rewards. These tables could be "user saved" such that previous item drops from the table would be stored so that certain item drops could be guaranteed within a certain amount of battles.
• Using NGUI to create various UI screens such as the visual representation of loot tables in the battle victory screen.
• A dynamic music system which swaps between different music playlists using various conditional triggers. This allows different audio tracks to play when the player is on a specific quest or in a certain location.
• A mini-game/activity with a "Pick a Path" style story telling gameplay. This involved creating a custom Unity inspector to allow non developers to create content for this feature. This allowed new "pieces" (story text, player choice, etc) to be easily defined and a drop down list of all created pieces is dynamically created, allowing any choice to point at any other created text.

The Aetherlight (2016) | PC

Working together with a small team, I helped develop a prototype for an asymmetric co-op stealth game. While I was primarily a programmer, this project also allowed me to dabble in some level and game design and web development.

I worked as a client-side developer on Star86, an online virtual world for kids. Sadly, the game was taken down in July 2014. I helped build and maintain a variety of game features as well as developer tools within the Unity editor, refactoring of legacy systems and recreating most of the UI in game.

Examples of work include:

• A recording system where players can capture gameplay footage which are then rendered offsite and uploaded to YouTube. Also created an in-house extension of this system which allowed real-time playback and editing of a recording.
• Various music related systems including a music mixing/editing tool similar to Garage Band. Music created from this system could then be exported to YouTube, similar to the recordings.
• System for players to pick up or leave behind pets in their home where they would be free to roam around in and be synchronised across the network.
• An action bar system which allowed players to equip any item in their inventory.

Used a range of technologies including the YouTube API, Dropbox API, Plastic SCM, Mixpanel, Google Tag Manager etc

Star86 (2011) | Web

Focused on papers relating to Artificial Intelligence, Computer Graphics and Computer Vision.

Awards:

• Michael Lennon Award For Excellence in Information Technology (top student in fourth/final year).
• Institution of Engineering and Technology Prize for (top student in third year).