zvanrossem

Hello! My name is Zack and I'm an experienced Video Game Programmer who's been working professionally for over 8 years. My primary language is C++ and my preferred game engine is Unreal Engine 5.

This page will serve as a portfolio of the works that I am able to show, this doesn't include all of the works I've been a part of but i hope you enjoy what I have here to show off.

AOD Training

https://zvanrossem.itch.io/aod

This was my first professional experience in Game Development, I worked alongside my contractor who acted as project lead, designer, artist, and translator while my role was to be the sole programmer. I was responsible for creating all of the gameplay elements, level building, controls, packaging for Android/iOS platforms, and anything else that goes into game development with such a small team.

As I mentioned, this game was released for mobile devices and it supports touch screen controls which I thought were pretty clever. There's the pause menu button int he upper left corner, two jump buttons in the bottom corners to accommodate different dominant hand types, and there were two invisible buttons that took up the left and right halves of the screen space which moved the character left and right respectively.

AOD Training took advantage of level streaming to ensure that the game ran well on lower performance hardware.

FreeRun

https://zvanrossem.itch.io/freerun

This has been a passion project of mine that has been cooped up in my head and I'm thrilled to have a completed demo to show off after a good while of solo development.

FreeRun is a parkour/freerunning style game inspired by Mirror's Edge that gives the player control of a character with a first person full-bodied camera perspective. I tried to cram as many movement options as I thought would be fun to use to navigate the level. This was an opportunity to grew exponentially as a developer and to showcase some of my inherent designing ability as someone that has been playing and analyzing games my whole life. I've had too much fun tinkering with this and showing my family the fruits of my labor whenever I perfected another Parkour Movement method or feature

The player can:
Sprint
Slide
Swing from pipes
Grind on rails
Climb walls vertically
Run alongside walls horizontally
Climb ladders
Mantle
Vault
Roll from a high fall
Slide automatically when landing on a steep slope


These parkour movement abilities happen organically and they will trigger on any object in the world, in my testing I was able to drop my character into a map pack and it was like visiting a new park where I could immediately start running around like a maniac. I'll have to come back to this at another point to really try to dive deep into my efforts and thought processes while I was building this game. Of course I'd prefer to blab about it in person to anyone who was interested in learning more about it.



These images are taken from live gameplay, the only difference is that I pulled back the camera a little for style purposes. I've been really blown away by how it feels to run around these environment in a first person perspective.



I plan to continue my work on this project in my free time and I have so many plans for new features including:
Multiplayer support
Multiple levels
Leaderboards
Better/more animations
More Parkour methods - namely shimmying while grabbing a ledge

If you were sent this profile pertaining to an application I filled out, please feel free to reach out to me and I will be happy to supply game keys for your review.

Thank you for reading!