Gregory Avery-Weir: A Portfolio

Résumé

I am a creative Python, C#, and ActionScript 3 developer who wants to do clever problem-solving and user-focused programming. If you'd like to see my résumé, it's available in PDF form.

My résumé is built using L^aT_eX, the great typesetting system. If you're interested in the source code, you can get that too.

Games

I've made over 20 games for commercial and freeware release, mostly in AS3 for the Flash platform. Below is a selection; a more complete listing is available on my site.

• (I Fell In Love With) The Majesty of Colors

  

  Last night I had a dream. I floated in dark­ness, immense, squamous. My mind flowed like my body, slow­ly and sin­uously, tremen­dous wheels both too slow and too fast for me to des­cribe to you now. I was per­fect and titanic and serene. But then, as I moved through the cold abyss, I saw a light. And as I came near I saw some­thing… wonder­ful. — The Dreamer

  “The Majesty of Colors” has been played over 2.5 million times. It has won multiple Flash gaming awards and was nomin­ated for many more. It uses pixel art, inverse kine­matics, nonlinear story­lines, and balloons.

  Play “The Majesty of Colors”To play this game, use a wider screen or go to Ludus Novus.

• Looming

  

  Even the dead tell stories, January. Among the rub­ble and the ashes and the bones and the watch­ing spires, there are glim­mers of know­ledge and secrets that show what was and will be. That is Looming, Jan­uary: a snap­shot of the end of time, a place for remem­bering and discov­ering. — September

  Looming is the story of a dead world as told by its rubble. It has a one-bit-color aes­thetic and a deso­late mood. A critic has called it my lapis noster and its story a vortex of mysteries, never fully eluci­dated.

  Play LoomingTo play this game, use a wider screen or go to Ludus Novus.

• Beneath the Waves

  

  I loved you once, split-toed dirt-swimmer. These idols are the bones of wonders. Why should the sun claim the land any more than the sea? He sees the top, we see the bottom. I hoped the lesser creatures would eat you so that I could pretend you never were. I sup­pose I have no more choice than you do. — the Kraken

  Beneath the Waves is a game about the water and the sky. It comp­ares the mood of the sea (wide, unknown, fast-moving) and the land (stable, vertical, safe). It provides experi­ences of rushing motion and dizzying vertigo. While devel­oping it I over­came chal­lenges of lim­ited Flash re­sources and the gener­ation of inter­esting arti­ficial intel­ligence under con­strained condi­tions.

  Play Beneath the WavesTo play this game, use a wider screen or go to Ludus Novus.

• Passing the Ball

  

  The Web Wise Kids mission is to teach kids, parents and the commu­nity the value of making safe and wise choices in a techno­logically evolving world. We do this by creating and distrib­uting inter­active content through the same media in which kids and adults live their lives. — WebWiseKids.org

  Passing the Ball is a project commis­sioned by the organizers of a ma­jor pro­fes­sion­al con­fer­ence in order to promote the non-profit charity Web Wise Kids. I worked with two separ­ate stake­hol­der groups to gather mar­ket­ing goals and produce a project that satisfied creative and aesthetic goals. The finished game uses procedural art and music to intro­duce the ideas of online safety in a meta­phoric, inter­active way.

  Play Passing the BallTo play this game, use a wider screen or go to Ludus Novus.

Writing

I'm experienced writing for a variety of audiences and can communicate technical information to less technical people as well as explain design matters to people with a coder mindset. Below are some examples of my writing that demonstrate my communication skills.

• ConTeXt: an alternative to LaTeX

  The Context code is a lot cleaner and more readable, and I find that the Context approach to things makes it much easier to separate formatting and content. Additionally, although you can’t see it here, the Latex version requires over 20 external packages, each of which does a little (or a large!) tweak that enables the whole thing. Context? Everything works out-of-the-box. Unfortunately, it’s more difficult to figure out just how to get it out of said box.

  Read more at my blog.

• The Video Game Album

  So what are the advantages to this album approach? The first is variety. By giving players a range of experiences in one box, a title is more likely to appeal to more people for longer… Second, it is usually cheaper in terms of time and effort to make several games that share the same engine, art, and/or setting than it is to make the same number of games separately. The same amount of game can be made with fewer resources. Additionally, once the core codebase for the games is complete, the teams for each game can be split off from each other, which simplifies communication and lets large development teams avoid the problems that arise with the point of diminishing returns on team size.

  Read more at GameSetWatch.

• The Interface of Hotel Dusk

  By incorporating logic and a clever interface into the challenge, this strengthens the player's identification with the main character. She's not just clicking on the flour then the pen to USE FLOUR ON PEN; the player is involved in the entire process, making it feel like she's actually finding clues herself. This sort of approach is shockingly rare among adventure games; it really only appears in “casualized” games like Hotel Dusk or Zak & Wiki. However, it may be the key to revising adventure games for the modern video game world.

  Read more at GameSetWatch.