A collection of mobile games and applications built during my video game design specialization at UPEI, spanning Unity3D, Unreal Engine, and native Android development.
I came into university knowing I wanted to make things people interact with. Games were the first medium that clicked for me. But building a game from scratch is humbling. You need to think about physics, input handling, state management, UI, performance, and player experience all at once. Through UPEI's video game design specialization, I had the chance to tackle these challenges across multiple engines and platforms. The question was never "can I build one game?" It was "can I build many, each teaching me something different?"
Over the course of several semesters, I built a range of mobile games and apps using different tools depending on the project goals.
Each project shipped as a working prototype. The Unity games were the most polished, with functional gameplay loops, sound, and scoring. The Unreal projects pushed my understanding of 3D rendering and performance tradeoffs. The Android apps taught me how to build outside the game engine bubble, dealing with lifecycle management, permissions, and platform constraints. Firebase turned out to be the connective tissue that made several of these projects feel like real products rather than classroom exercises.
Working across engines and platforms taught me that tools are just tools. The real skill is understanding what you are building and why. Unity and Unreal have very different philosophies, and learning both made me a better developer because I stopped thinking in terms of one engine's patterns. I also learned that games are the hardest kind of software to get right, because the user has to enjoy it, not just use it. That standard shaped how I think about every interface I have built since.