Free Will

Role(s): Programmer, Designer
Technologies Used: C#, Unity 2D
Type: Volunteer
May 2023 - Aug. 2024
Website

Finalist at the 2025 BAFTA Student Awards

Responsibilities:

External Puzzles and Sequences: Executed 3 puzzles and sequences utilizing external executables and C# system libraries, allowing the player to interact with the game outside of the Unity game window
Save System: Designed and deployed a manual save and load system with invisible checkpoints and data persistence using JSON files

Localization Support: Spearheaded development of a localization pipeline and refactorization of a custom dialogue system to support localization, resulting in a 100% increase in audience reach
Testing and Debugging: Collaborated with a team of 8 engineers to resolve critical bugs and restructure code, resulting in a 30% improvement in readability and a more stable and maintainable codebase

Free Will is a 2D psychological puzzle RPG where the puzzles happen outside of the game. Dig deep into the system code to fix the corruption, and uncover information that might be better off hidden.

Spamming Error Popups

Our goal was to spam quickly spawning error popup windows that could not be closed without in-game intervention. My task, for Windows, was to instantiate the error popups outside of the game window. I created the popups as a separate executable in C# using Windows Forms. In Unity, I created functionality for instantiating the windows, closing all the windows, and keeping track of the number of windows closed by the user.

Cursor-Repelling Force

Our goal was to have a meta puzzle in which the player would push back against a cursor-repelling force to get the cursor in a certain area on the screen, and my task was to create this force. For Windows, I used the user32.dll library in C# to detect and move the cursor's position within a certain radius of a point. I continued tweaking parameters after playtests and feedback and resulted in a challenging, yet simple meta puzzle.

Invisible Maze

Our goal was to create an invisible maze that utilized an external ASCII text file to communicate the maze's layout to the player without letting the player modify the maze. My task was to create functionality for reading, writing, renaming, and correcting the text file to reflect the maze.

To prevent the player from modifying the maze, I made the file read-only unless the game was modifying the file. Whenever in-game switches were pressed that modified the maze, the file's contents and name were modified accordingly. When loading in the game, the game uses the file's name to determine which in-game switches have already been pressed. If the player tries to rename the file while playing through the maze, the game internally keeps track of what the maze should be named and corrects it accordingly.