Taha Akbarally
Game Developer | Physicist
taha.akbarally@gmail.com
Hello!
I am a Game Developer with 4+ years of experience building a broad variety of games, from simple education focused games, casual puzzle games, and challenging platformers.
I have also built various tools such as UI Management Systems, Wavefunction Dungeon Generators, and 8-bit Synthesizers.
Languages:
C#, HLSL, Typescript, LUA, Python
Tools:
Unity, Godot, PyGame, Hammer Editor, Git, Photon, Mecanim, Shadergraph, Visual Effect Graph
Blobbers
Blobbers is a cute 2D puzzle game inspired by other popular puzzle games such as ‘Baba Is You’ and 'A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build'.
As part of Gobblefish Games, a small studio I lead, I was the sole programmer, and musician, for Blobbers, working alongside an artist and a level designer.Building the puzzle loop for this game was an interesting challenge, as I wanted the entire board to be able to resolve without the need for first checking the validity of cascading moves. It does this by simultaneously resolving every movement’s validity!
I’m particularly proud of how cute the blobs’ faces look when they move, which involved a custom animation system to tween the face along an animation curve in the direction and within the duration of the movement.
Pom
Pom is a challenging 2D platformer inspired by other popular platformer games such as ‘Celeste’ and 'Super Meatboy'.
The second addition to Gobblefish Games, I was the sole programmer for Pom, working alongside an artist, level designer and musician.As part of the workflow for building this game, I leaned heavily on an ECS framework to generate flexible game entities through composition (Hazards, Platforms, Projectiles, Powers, Spawn Points, etc).
As a result I now have a general library of components that I can drag and drop into any game to quickly build complex, interwoven interactions!
TNK
Cybersecurity Education Game Development
As part of TNK's Upling project, I designed and developed games for kids to help raise awareness of cybersecurity issues. This required a unique approach to game design, asking questions such as “How can we develop a game to measure a user’s conscientiousness towards cybersecurity threats or their aptitude towards harm prevention software?”
Tilemap Generator
Tilemap Generator is a small package that generates larger tilemaps from example tilemaps using a Wavefunction Collapse Algorithm
As part of a building the prototype for a Legend of Zelda inspired game for a client, one of the requirements was to have endless procedurally generated dungeons.Wavefunction Collapse is an algorithm that generates images by collapsing cells with the lowest entropy. It is called this because it mimics the phenomena of electrons ‘collapsing’ to a known state.
The generator takes the conventional Wavefunction collapse algorithm, designed for textures, and expands and optimises it to work with Unity’s tilemaps, allowing for generating endless tilemaps from a single reference.
8-Bit Synthesizer
8-Bit Synthesizer is a minimalist chiptune DAW for creating easily scriptable audio within Unity.
As part of a building the prototype for a Legend of Zelda inspired game for a client, one of the requirements was to have endless procedurally generated dungeons.Wavefunction Collapse is an algorithm that generates images by collapsing cells with the lowest entropy. It is called this because it mimics the phenomena of electrons ‘collapsing’ to a known state.
The generator takes the conventional Wavefunction collapse algorithm, designed for textures, and expands and optimises it to work with Unity’s tilemaps, allowing for generating endless tilemaps from a single reference.
Shaders
& Animations
Another facet of Game Development that I absolutely love is the technical art portion of it.
Whether its creating custom shaders, procedural animation, or adding cool and weird effects, I will do anything to add that extra ‘oomph’ of life to a game!
More Games?
These are some of the games I’ve made over the years, whether for fun, a game jam, or to prototype concepts that went into other work. For all these games, I was the sole programmer. I often was responsible for the art and sound design as well, but for many I worked alongside other artists, level designers and musicians.