JUDE WHITE
Game Designer, Developer and Programmer
PERSONAL PROJECTS
Since I work full-time on paid freelance work, I only get evenings and weekends to work on personal projects. That being said, I still make sure to find the time to work on ideas that I am passionate about and hone my craft. Below are a collection of ongoing projects and smaller experiments.
QUICK LINKS
PERSONAL PROJECTS
FORTNITE EXPERIENCES
I solo-developed two highly detailed Fortnite custom maps using UEFN (Unreal Editor for Fortnite).
Immersive Trench Warfare 1917
I spent a month of my time, £100 of my money (on mostly-period-accurate 3D assets) and a large chunk of my enduring sanity bringing the horrors of trench warfare to uh... *checks notes*... Fortnite?
This is 'Immersive Trench Warfare 1917', a Fortnite experience built with UEFN that asks 'can we effectively capture the atmosphere of the trenches while still remaining firmly within Epic Games' content guidelines 😅. It's a PvPvE map where 24 players and 24 bots can battle it out with guns, tanks, turrets and more to try and break the stalemate, storm the enemy's trench and claim victory!
A core focus for this project was to effectively capture the futility of the conflict, and as a result I designed the map to be both simultaneously enjoyable to play, but also pretty grueling. Pushing across no-man's land is difficult, impossible even without clever use of your team's turrets, vehicles and artillery.
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Island Code: 4296-3916-5055
First-Person Wasteland Extraction
I spent almost every spare hour during evenings and weekends, for three consecutive months, building 'First-Person Wasteland Extraction', a custom Fortnite experience built using UEFN - Unreal Editor for Fortnite.
This project really pushed the limits of what can be achieved within the constraints of UEFN - the map is so large and so detailed that I had to do multiple optimization passes *per day* just to keep it under the fairly restrictive UEFN memory limit, and there were lots of interesting compromises I had to make in order to build something on this scale. I managed to include a highly detailed hub area with traders, multiple large towns and settlements, and huge stretches of wasteland in between, all through smart use of occlusion culling.
In particular, ensuring the environment was always teeming with enemies was a significant challenge; there's a pretty small cap on the amount of enemies that can be active at once, so I set up a network of trigger zones to unload enemies outside of the player's current zone, and populate that zone with fresh ones, giving the impression of thousands of zombies being active on the map when in reality, the number was closer to a maximum of 100.
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Island Code: 7385-6000-0291
COMPRESSION
Compression is my main passion project. It is an ongoing labour of love which has been in active development for 4 years, during evenings and weekends. It is a survival horror game with a unique twist; players can take video recordings using their in-game camera, and then re-watch those recordings to cause shifts and changes to the game's environment. Below you can see some prototype footage of the game's various mechanics in action, as well as some assets I created for the game.
UNTITLED FPS PROTOTYPE
During breaks from working on Compression, I decided I needed something more simple and instantly gratifying to work on. As such, I began work on a small FPS prototype, with AI inspired by the replica soldiers from FEAR, able to communicate with each other and make some strategic decisions about when to attack, retreat, flank etc.
MISCELLANEOUS EXPERIMENTS
Below is a collection of things I have made and either a) been unable to finish or develop further due to time constraints, b) were never intended to be more than a fun side-experiment or c) simply did not work out in the way I had hoped and therefore were discontinued.
For a while, I considered remaking 'Polyraptor' and developing it into a full release. The project ultimately fizzled out due to time constraints and professional commitments, but I am still very pleased with the animator controller I set up for the raptor, which was modelled and animated by my friend and colleague Dan Marian.
A while ago I began development on an arcade mech shooter. This project is currently on-hold, but I intend to return to it someday.