Nadya Primak

Noisy Planet Crossword Redesign

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Noisy Planet falls under the NIDCD (National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders) department, but is a website specifically geared toward children. The crossword is meant to help children learn the vocabulary related to noise and hearing. Prior to the redesign, the game was written in Flash and was not responsive. It could only be played on a computer, which was quite limiting given how many kids prefer to use their tablets or smartphones to play games. I was tasked with not only redesigning the crossword but also developing it to be both easy to play and easy to read on different screen sizes.

I programmed the crossword with jQuery to make it easier to traverse the DOM, which had to happen every time the user entered a new letter. This created the optimal user experience of seeing the crossword get populated as you typed, providing immediate user feedback. I also used a mobile first approach, because I knew that tackling the mobile experience for the crossword would be more difficult than the desktop. Not wanting to re-create the wheel, I searched the internet to see what other crosswords I could find and see if they would inspire me.

I ended up looking to the New York Times crossword. Though I felt that their interface was unnecessarily complicated, I took a cue from the NYT design by only letting the user see one crossword question at a time. Unlike the NYT interface, the only menu involved was two arrows for going back one question or forward to the next question. The crossword would also conveniently highlight which question you were currently on, so as not to confuse the user about whether they were looking at an up-down or a left-right part of the crossword.

• Project Type: Client Project
• Date: April - May 2017
• Skills: HTML5, jQuery, Javascript

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Box Shooter

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Like Roller Madness, this game was built in part while taking a class on Coursera taught by the University of Michigan. Using Unity, I built my first shooter game where the player's goal is to get as high of a score as possible by shooting the green squares for points and the white squares to increase their time limit. Also similar to Roller Madness, I created Level One following along with the instructor while adding my own features to Level Two to make things more challenging.

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The features I added included increasing how far away the boxes are from the player, making the sboxes move faster, and making the yellow boxes which cause you to lose time closer and bigger. I also made the white squares which gain the player more time smaller and farther away. I think this made Level Two a lot more interesting.

Months later before I started working on Nightcrawler VR Bowling, I created a version of Box Shooter in VR just to get a feeling for the controls. I have to admit I became much prouder of the game when I ported it to VR because the environment was a lot more engaging when it surrounded you than when you saw it on a screen. However I struggled with making the interface work for a VR game, which introduced me to the challenges of user interface design in virtual reality.

• Project Type Unity, Coursera Game Design Certification
• Date: October 2016
• Skills: Unity

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Roller Madness

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I had wanted to learn Unity for a long time but hadn't taken the plunge until this Coursera certification came around, taught by University of Michigan. This was the first game I made with Unity, where Level One was primarily following along with the instructor while for Level Two students were instructed to add their own feature to the game.

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You control the ball with the arrow keys and must avoid falling off the edges or into the holes in the ground. Don't forget to stay away from the squares that are chasing you! Oh, and try to collect as many coins as you can. That is pretty important too.

I think the feature I was most proud of in this game was learning about enemy mechanics and creating the enemy "squares" that chase the ball around. I was worried that creating enemy mechanics might be very challenging, but thankfully because of my previous software development skills it wasn't too bad.

• Project Type Coursera Game Design Class
• Date: October 2016
• Skills: Unity

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Hnefatafl

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Hnefatafl is an ancient viking game that predates chess. Between jobs I was inspired to tackle an online version of the game when my fiancee sent me an article about it. Growing up I enjoyed chess and I always thought that if I could code a game I would have the confidence to enter the workforce as a programmer.

Visit the Website

Friends can play against each other on the same computer, with a board built on HTML5 Canvas. When I looked at other developers who coded Hnefatafl for online play, I noticed that the game board was very small and it was difficult for beginner players to know where their pieces can move. Since this is not a mainstream game like chess, I felt it was especially important to show users where their pieces could move, so I didn't leave them guessing. I would highlight the path of the piece whenever a piece was clicked on by the player.

I later decided to try and make a version of the game where you could play against an online opponent. The most challenging aspect was understanding AJAX calls and the tedious testing to make sure both users would see the same game board when playing against each other. On one hand I am glad that I learned a lot about MYSQL and structuring a database. On the other hand, I wasn't able to get it to work all the way because as soon as the database started filling up with past players it would stop working properly. The way I designed it, players were supposed to be deleted from the database as soon as they left the game. If I were to do it today I would use something like socket.io, but I don't think it existed at the time I built the game. With my newfound knowledge of Node I think I could build a player matching pool that would be a better implementation.

• Project Type Self Assigned
• Date: May 2015
• Skills: Design, Front-End (HTML5, CSS, Javascript), Back-End (PHP, AJAX, MySQL)

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Dungeon Queen Escape

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Queen Dungeon Escape is a platformer game that I built for the final assignment in Michigan University's Game Development Certification Program, for the Advanced Techniques curriculum.

Similar to the other assignments, we first recreated a game by following the instructor but instead of just making a second level that had our own features, we made a copy of the game and had to add several new features to really make the game our own. I took that part of the assignment to heart, and replaced all of the graphics except for the moving platforms and the knights with my own graphics. I didn't want the game to be recognizable as something from an assignment.

Play the Game

I also wrote some of my own scripts, for example the bats which fly around the world can pick you up, carry you around, and then drop you (possibly to your death). Adding hit damage from falling was another aspect that I scripted.

Another important thing I learned during this project was creating animations in Unity. Rather than having a death animation when the queen gets captured by the knights, I decided to show her getting locked up in a cell again.

In the framework for the platformer the character only had one objective, which was to reach an object in the map. I decided to also add an extra layer to the winning mechanic, by having the Queen need to find a key and then get to the door.

All in all this was more challenging than the other Unity projects I did for the Game Development certification, and I may expand this game and add more platformer levels.

• Project Type Game Development Certification Project
• Date: October 2016
• Skills: Unity Game Development

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Education Sim

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Education Sim was built for the itch.io hosted ResistJam, a game jam for resisting authoritarianism. I had been wanting to make a statement about the importance of education since Betsy Devos started to lead the Department of Education.

I made this game to illustrate how important it is to a society for its population to be educated, and how valuable education can be. However, along the way I decided it also needed to address stereotypes about who is and isn't educated. The fact is, you cannot know how intelligent someone is by simply looking at them.

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The game becomes challenging for a variety of reasons, but especially because of the economical divides between educated and uneducated people that I tried to represent. I added a tax mechanic to the game in addition to happiness and education statistics for each individual. The idea was that you could increase taxes if you didn't have enough funds, but this could decrease the happiness of individuals and lead to some (the educated, typically) leaving the community for good. I ended up creating a lot of complexity too quickly, and perhaps was too focused on the message of the game and not enough about the mechanics.

I created different qualities and types schools, that cost different amounts for students to attend. In addition I made it so different types of schools admit different age ranges of students, and also have different maintenance fees that sap at your income to build additional resources. It was fun to experiment and see what would happen as you built schools but ultimately, the game was too difficult to beat. That being said, it was an important learning opportunity for me and helped me realize that just because you CAN add lots of complexity and features to your game, doesn't mean you SHOULD.

• Project Type Game Development Certification Project
• Date: October 2016
• Skills: Unity Game Development

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Nightcrawler VR Bowling

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This game is a bowling arcade game built for the HTC Vive. I created it with Unity and the OpenVR Steam SDK. It is my first professional venture into the world of VR development, where I aimed to create a product that I could sell on the Steam marketplace.

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While most of the 3D assets for the world were purchased, the 3D bowling pins and ball as well as the collider were custom made in Blender by me for more realistic physics. It was also important to me that the player can see their score, and have it properly counted as in a real game of bowling, with strikes and spares taken into consideration. This introduced a fair amount of complexity, such as respawning the pins every frame and counting the pins that go down.

• Project Type Game Development Certification Project
• Date: October 2016
• Skills: Unity Game Development

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Bunny Defender

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This was one of my very first game projects when I was learning about Javascript game engines. PhaserJS is a very popular library and I found a class on Lynda that allowed me to begin learning how to use this library. The game that we built in this class was called Bunny Defender. The code is also on github.

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PhaserJS was the first Javascript library that I learned to use, and it was exciting for me to see how I could make a game that played well on a mobile phone browser. Prior to this I had thought that I would have to learn to code for the Android platform with Java, but now I was seeing that web games were more compatible with mobile than I previously thought.

In the Bunny Defender game you have to touch the asteroids to destroy them before they hurt the bunnies. I learned about sprites and how to animate them so that the bunnies appear to hop back and forth. I learned how to make a spritesheet as well which was a useful skill.

• Project Type Game Development
• Date: October 2016
• Skills: Phaser JS Game Engine

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Grand Canyon Quiz Game

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This was the most recent game I made. Making this game was a long trip, that I reference a few times in my blog. I had always wanted to make an educational game because I believe that games are a great way to teach kids and adults new things. I also wanted to experience what it would be like working as a game development contractor, and there was a company interested in hiring people for educational games for children that I signed up with.

Get the Game

I chose from a list of topics to make a game about erosion. After a few days of brainstorming, I decided the grand canyon would be an interesting setting for my game, and started to look at assets on the Unity store. In the end I chose to work with low poly assets and started to build my world with a river that players would navigate in a boat. There were some challenging aspects, such as adding the quiz questions and checking whether the user had the correct answer. But far more challenging than that was figuring out the physics of the water. I wanted it to bob up and down and be realistic, but the physics created unintended bugs. It was also time consuming to create the environment and add all of the details. Sometimes there were cactuses that were floating above the river and it became exhausting to look at every single detail.

As I continued play testing the game and even showing it at a local game event, I realized my game needed something more besides the questions to make it interesting. I decided to add gem stones for players to pursue to gain points as well as logs that the players need to avoid. Unfortunately my contract ended up falling through because the game needed to work in a browser on older iPads at schools. I had already made my game far too complex for that to work out, The fact was that just having 3D graphics in the game made it very difficult for that to work out, but I was still proud of the game I had made. I decided to pivot and release my game on the Google Play Store rather than make a new game from scratch.

In the end I'm actually happy it worked out this way. Grand Canyon Quiz Game was the longest project I ever worked on, and went through several different phases much like real game projects. I had to do refactoring and test my game on different platforms repeatedly. I went through the different publishing steps and reached out to the manager at sciencegamescenter.org to have my game featured there. Playing my game for the first time on my phone was a really exciting moment.

• Project Type Game Design & Development
• Date: February 2020
• Skills: Unity 3D

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