Games

Afterlight Gameplay Trailer

Afterlight

A unique mind-bending co-op puzzle platformer about light and shadow, where a young child in their 3D home casts shadows on walls to help their father's spirit progress through a mysterious and dangerous 2D world.

My Role: Lead Game Designer

Level Design
Gameplay Design
Systems Design

Skills Utilized

Communication and Collaboration
Adaptability and Flexibility
Creativity and Innovation
Problem-solving and Decision-making

Forged in Fire

Developed in 2024 as the final capstone project for my Games and Interactivity bachelors at Swinburne University and presented at PAX Australia, Afterlight is the culmination of a year's worth of hard work, dedication and problem solving.

The game is an asymmetrical 2-player coop puzzle platformer about using light and shadows cast by interactable objects in a 3D environment to create or destroy platforms in a 2D environment, with each player working from one of these environments. However, not all information is available to both players so they must effectively communicate to successfully solve the various puzzles of Afterlight.

Beginning as the sole programmer for the project, I created the initial prototype featuring the core shadow-platform mechanic of the game before transitioning to a designer. In this role, I helped with overall game design but was primarily responsible for level design, creating every level in the game myself with feedback from both the team and our playtesters. Each level was designed to teach players a core mechanic, with each also increasing in difficulty by combining mechanics and introducing time constraints.

Every Step Earned

The entire project from start to finish was rife with challenges to overcome and problems to solve, but with the hard work of everyone on the team, nothing stopped us for long.

On the programming side, from the first prototype I developed we discovered the difficulty of implementing a shadow-collider mechanic that was both accurate, dynamic and performant. For example, the initial version only worked for purely convex 3D shapes, requiring a significant investment to enable all kinds of shapes and bring the game's vision to life.

On the design side, having never designed a co-op or puzzle game before, I was truly a fish out of water going into this project and spent lots of time experimenting and gathering feedback to develop my skills. Due to the asymmetrical nature of the game, we kept running into the issue of imbalanced player agency as one player would often feel 'held hostage' by the other until they discovered the puzzle's solution. While these issues were never completely solved, they were able to be mitigated through simplified, more streamlined levels with clearer, more focused solutions for both players.

This was easily one of the most demanding projects I have completed, however much like many of my favourite games, it's difficulty is exactly what made it such a rewarding experience.

A Catalyst for Evolution

From humble design-concept beginnings to presenting at PAX Australia, Afterlight pushed me to new heights and gave me the most valuable experience of my entire University journey.

I learned how to engage in meaningful discussions with team members where everyone's ideas are heard and how to respectfully navigate both giving and receiving feedback in the pursuit of a better end product.

Crucially, I gained a deeper understanding of the importance of sacrifice and compromise in creating something unique, where your first ideas are rarely your best, and being comfortable experimenting and letting go of old ideas as your understanding matures is vital to success.

Finally, the importance of playtesting when developing was reinforced as we revamped the game's design countless times after gathering feedback from playtesters and were enlightened to many crucial oversights we had made in terms of both difficulty and mechanic intuition.

I am extremely proud of what the team and myself have created and with this experience under my belt, I feel miles more capable and confident moving forward into future projects.

Monstie Wash Gameplay Trailer

Monstie Wash

A cosy 2D fantasy creature cleaning game where you play as a pet groomer with a prosthetic arm and must scrub off grime and remove debris from mythical monsters without losing another arm.

My Role: Lead Programmer

Gameplay Programming
Systems Design
Team Management

Skills Utilized

Leadership and Delegation
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
Time Management and Task Prioritization
Communication and Negotiation
Version Control Processes

The Tip of the Spear

Developed throughout 2024 as the final capstone project for my Computer Science bachelors at Swinburne University and presented at PAX Australia, Monstie Wash was an exciting journey where I got to stretch my legs as the lead programmer of a team for the very first time.

A simple game where you play as a pet groomer in a fantasy world who cleans all kinds of mythical creatures for a living, Monstie Wash is an all-ages game where you can unwind, bond with some cute monsters, and bathe in the satisfaction of transforming a messy beast into a sparkly clean pet.

As lead programmer for the team, I was primarily responsible for managing the other three programmers (delegating tasks, managing workloads, reviewing code pull requests etc.), engaging in weekly catch-ups and task-breakdowns with the producer, and writing documentation and code for the game itself.

Upskill, Upskill, Upskill

Being a lead programmer for the project was certainly an unexpected challenge. I had never been in this role before, so it was initially difficult to establish clear conventions and guidelines for the group, and required lots of research and communications with team members to get our workflow setup with everyone on the same page. These conventions evolved as we became more experienced, and proved to be immensely useful to keeping our work consistent.

A significant issue throughout the year of development was that of merge conflicts. With so many people working on the same project, many of whom inexperienced with version control, merge conflicts were frequent and occasionally severe. Even though it was my first time using version control, I was responsible for handling these larger conflicts as the lead programmer due to my deeper understanding of the project as a whole, and so spent countless hours resolving these conflicts by hand. Lucky for me, I'm a bit of a masochist and so didn't mind this process.

Despite seeming like a fairly simple game on the outside, the inner workings of the technical features (like the dirt-erasing system) proved to be some of the most challenging programming work I've done yet, requiring research, upskilling, and many hours to bring to fruition. On top of this, programming systems like this that could be easily used and modified by the other programmers on the team was a unique wrinkle I hadn't encountered before as a hitherto mostly solo dev.

Teachings of Dirty Hands

Working on Monstie Wash was an invaluable experience and one that grew my capabilities more than any other project I had done previously.

First and foremost, while I had used version control a little in the past, I had never fully understood how it worked or what I was doing with it. That changed as a result of this project, and I now feel infinitely more confident using these tools. With a brief introduction to using GitHub by my producer and a whole lot of hands-on experience, I learned many of the ins and outs of managing a repository such as branch management, pull requests, conflict resolution, merging and rebasing, and so much more.

On the team management side of things, I learned the paramount importance of spending the time at the beginning of a project to clearly define the processes, conventions, and workflows that the team will follow throughout the development cycle as our project file structure and art asset implementation having no clear requirements caused significant headaches as the project grew larger and more complex.

There were countless other lessons learned from this project that I'll carry forward with me like interpersonal conflict resolution, the importance of open communication and feedback within a team to shape processes, and the benefits of maintaining high morale on longer projects.

Helvede Gameplay

Helvede

A dimension-shifting action-platformer where you must dash, swing and shift your way through parallel dimensions - each with their own unique movesets - to escape death.

My Role: Game Designer / Programmer

Level Design
Gameplay Design
Gameplay Programming

Skills Utilized

Collaboration and Communication
Team Leadership and Management
Gameplay Design and Programming
C# Programming
Version Control with Github

A Team Effort

Helvede was a group assignment for my 2021 Digital Game Prototyping unit at Swinburne University of Technology. I worked in a group with three other team members, each with our own defined roles and responsibilities, where we were tasked with the ideation, design and creation of a digital game for which we were required to produce a playable prototype using Unity by the end of the semester.

My initial role was as the programmer as that was where I felt strongest, however throughout the course of the project I expanded my responsibilites to help my other team members when they fell behind, and ended up leading the team to project completion.

A Winding Road

Working on completing Helvede was never a straightforward process. Right from the gate at the ideation phase, the team had so many great ideas that we were all passionate about and we held many lengthy discussions full of sketches and moodboards in order to come to unanimous agreement.

As we progressed further into the project, various ideas were scrapped and reworked as new ones emerged from playtesting, and as the lead programmer and designer I had to keep on my toes in order to maintain flexible coding and design practices to accomodate for this rapidly evolving project.

More difficulties sprouted in the final stages of the project, where some members fell behind or simply went radio silent which required me to step up and lead the team to finish the game and deliver a playable, complete prototype.

Growing Capabilities

Collaborating with a team on Helvede taught me so much, both in terms of acquired skills and understanding of my capability. In having discussions throughout the project with my team, I honed my interpersonal skills as I gained experience in communicating, compromising, and collaborating on ideas. I learned the importance of listening to each team members input and how to let good ideas go in service of a greater vision.

In programming for this project, I undoubtably learned many new coding techniques and abilities as I overcame the many complications arising from creating complex, flexible player movement. Moreover, as I designed the tutorial level, feedback from various playtesters was invaluable in growing my understanding of the goals and objectives for the design of such a level and the approach that should be taken in teaching a new player how to play your game while maintaining the fun factor.

Potentially the most important outcome from this assignment was the growing understanding of my capabilities as a leader. I was not anticipating becoming the team's leader going into the project, however I did not hesitate when the opportunity emerged. While I certainly have much to learn about leadership, this project grew my self-confidence in the area and allowed me to learn in the field what it takes to lead a team to success.

Nuggetocalypse Game Trailer

Nuggetocalypse

A fast-paced action platformer about eating your way out of the nugget apocalypse.

Skills Utilized

Design
Gameplay Programming
Event Scripting
Enemy AI
Sound Design

A Gift for a Friend

In 2015, a friend approached me asking if I could make them a game based around their two favourite things: nuggets and pink donuts. Around a year of hard work later, in March of 2016, I released my first ever fully-fledged game, complete with a title screen, tutorial, credits and a story (of sorts). I solo-developed the game in Gamemaker Studio and it was an incredible learning experience.

Block by Block

I created Nuggetocalypse on my own over the course of a year, and in that time I faced many challenges. From the very beginning, I had to design a game loop that would be fun, fast-paced and satisfy the theme. Through brainstorming and iteration, I landed on the game loop present in the final product where the player must hit the nuggets with tomato sauce before consuming them in their agape vaccum-mouth.

Another challenge - as a very inexperienced artist at the time - was drawing and designing every single sprite, animation and background. A noteable difficulty was in drawing backgrounds that didn't interfere with the foreground's clarity - a problem solved through gaining an understanding of contrast and vibrancy. However, through research and experimentation, I was able to produce a coherent, colourful artstyle that matched the game's playful theme.

The following games are all still being developed! This means things shown are not final, but they should give an idea as to what the games are about and how they're progressing.

Feel free to reach out if you're curious about anything you see! :)

Work-in-Progress

Early Spellslingers Gameplay

Spellslingers

A 1v1 card game about combining elements into spells to defeat the opposing wizard. Strategize with impactful spell modifiers and a collection of game-changing utility spells to throw a wrench in the enemy's plans or enhance your own.

Skills Utilized

Multiplayer Networking
Complex Systems Design & Programming
Structured, High-Quality Coding Practices

Forged in Fire

blah

Contact Details

Email: cormac.dev@gmail.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/cormac-dorrat-dev

Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CormacDorrat

Itch.io: https://cormacdev.itch.io

Download Resume

Games

Games

Links

Meet the Team!

Play Afterlight!

Afterlight

My Role: Lead Game Designer

Skills Utilized

Forged in Fire

Links

Meet the Team!

Play Monstie Wash!

Monstie Wash

My Role: Lead Programmer

Skills Utilized

The Tip of the Spear

Links

Play Helvede!

Helvede

My Role: Game Designer / Programmer

Skills Utilized

A Team Effort

Links

Play Nuggetocalypse!

Nuggetocalypse

Skills Utilized

A Gift for a Friend

Work-in-Progress

Work-in-Progress

Links

Meet the Team!

Play Afterlight!

Spellslingers

Skills Utilized

Forged in Fire

Contact Me!

Contact Details