Welcome to Dynamic Atlas

Thanks for visiting the site! I hope you like it so far, I had a lot of fun designing and building it.

Before starting university, I had made a vague roadmap of all the goals I wanted to complete within the next four years. And although I’m still currently working through it, one of my major plans included participating in an internship or work experience each summer. With only three summers before I graduated, I wanted to build up my portfolio to give myself the best chance before entering the world of work. However, by the time I finished my first year, I found myself with no placements. At this point I wasn’t sure what to do, I tried convincing myself that there was always next year, but I kept feeling like I was going to waste one of my precious summers. After a few weeks of actual holiday, I decided that even if I didn’t achieve anything else, I was going to work on myself and develop my own skills. I entered two game development competitions and challenged myself to improve my software development skills especially within strict deadlines.

I first entered the GMTK game jam, one of the biggest competitions hosted by itch.io and GMTK. After discussing possible game mechanics with my friend, I was able to successfully produce a finished game in 4 days. Although the deadline was really tight and the final game did have a few bugs, I had made something that I was proud of and in the process learnt a lot about game design and about shaders specifically. One of the biggest things I realised was, that I should make a browser version of my games to improve accessibility.

I then used this newfound knowledge in the second competition I entered: Brackey’s game jam. Still a major competition, this time I had a week to make a game. With the confidence from my first venture, I designed a game that was definitely too ambitious for the timeframe. Unaware of this at the time, I spent pretty much all of my waking hours that week working on my game. Although I wasn’t able to finish the game in time, I did get far enough to show a proof of concept. I had learnt a lot about how procedural generation worked and I was even able to implement it to create a tile-based city builder game with save files.

The weeks after that, I reflected on what I had achieved so far and realised that maybe the success of a summer doesn’t need to come from outside. If I can’t find opportunities, I can create them myself. And that is what gave me the idea to build this website.

Over the past few weeks, I have spent my time researching, reading and typing to create the website you are now on. Over time, I hope to show more of my work, the projects I’m building and the progress of my four year roadmap. Hopefully, at the end of these four years, I will be able to look back at this idea of mine and remember how I got there. And I’ll know that even if things didn’t go to plan, I always followed my dynamic atlas: everchanging, forever onward.

If you would like to try out my projects, you can try them out on the projects page or at https://azuredepths.itch.io/construction-risk and https://azuredepths.itch.io/the-knight-cycle.