Austin Molina

Adjunct Instruction

2018 (Unity C#) Yavapai College Faculty

• My course (VGD171 Video Game Development) focused on learning C# among other learning outcomes
• The course spanned 7 weeks which was a change from the department's previous 16 week design
• It was up to me to redesign the syllabus and decide what assignments to give to my students
• I created a project for students new to game development that would fulfill my department's requirements
• Scope of the project:
• 2D animation and physics-based movement
• Health and score accompanied by UI
• Interactive objects and dialog system
• Game state persistence
• Simple enemy ai
• Overall, the class was a success with the majority of my students finishing the course with a functional and personalized version of the course project

3D Bullet Hell

2017 (Unity C#) University of Arizona Game Jam

Awarded "Most Innovative"

The game was created with Unity for a game jam in less than 48 hours. The theme was "Aliens" - we decided to make a bullet hell game inspired by Star Fox and Evangelion.

• My Role: Modeling, Animation, Boss Controls
• Learned how to animate in blender and translate animations to Unity during competition
• Player Cotrols, Music - Alex Katzfey
• Voice Acting, Music, Asset Collection - Connor Runyan

Claiming Xodius

2014 (GameMaker: Studio) Personal/Shipped

• Claiming Xodius was created over the course of 2.5 years
• All programming, design, and visual assets were created by Austin Molina
• Wesley Wyatt (sound designer) was recruited from reddit to create all music and sound assets
• An editing tool was created with GameMaker: Studio to aid in creation of:
• Levels
• Enemy Stats
• Items
• Events
• During development, information was posted on indieDB
• The game is available on itch.io

Polynaut

2017 (Unity C#) Class Project

• Proposed a project to be developed with two classmates over the course of a semester
• My role: level design, 3D modeling, game logic/persistence
• Team goal: Create a game to showcase a variety of graphical features in 25 minute slot
• Success depended on setting deadlines with realistic goals, regular communication, and weekly assessments of progress

Multi-User Dungeon

2016 (Java) Class Project

• This project was completed with 3 classmates
• Utilizes MVC (Model View Controller) paradigm
• Other design patterns:
• Singleton
• Builder
• Observer
• Agile development method
• 71 Java Classes
• Asynchronus with concurrent processes
• Supports multiple users and accounts accross a network
• My task was to:
• Create classes necessary for the server. Including handlers for each client
• Build a protocol for sending, receiving, and processing network messages
• Implement a stack-based game-state manager
• tl;dr I put the 'C' in MVC
• I also created a tool that would allow my team to create ASCII art for the client
• After discussing the project with my team, I sketched a UML diagram that would support all project specifications
• Modifications were made as a group, but my initial design served as a strong foundation for the project

Other Games

2007-2016 (GameMaker: Studio) Personal

• First picked up Game Maker as a teenager at around 2007
• I started with the drag-and-drop code blocks, but eventually began to learn GML, the built in programming language
• My early projects were rough. Lots of platformers and top down adventure games
• After high school, I started building more complex games, for example, Claiming Xodius
• My final Game Maker projects:
• Implementation of Perlin noise used to procedurally generate 3D terrain
• Game Maker has little built in 3D functionality - it took a lot of math to get collision working
• GLSL shader was written to render a depth map. This was used to calculate mouse coordinates
• A multiplayer game where users can select a character and battle enemies
• The server supports multiple players that can each participate in battles with different enemies
• This is a concept I will revisit in the future, but likely with a different engine

Dragon Sculpt

2018 (Blender)

• The dragon was initially sculpted with dynamic topology
• The sculpt was remeshed for UV mapping
• Normals from the sculpt were projected onto the low-poly remesh
• A diffuse texture was then painted with the aid of a drawing tablet
• You can see my other models and art on instagram
• Started modeling in Blender about 3 years back; the learning curve is steep and I still have a long way to go
• I'm now more sparing of the decimate tool that I was so fond of while working on Polynaut