Stephan Ennen
A Self-taught unity programmer
8 years experience
Located near Seattle, WA, I have always had a passion for games and their power to deliver powerful experiences to players. My experience with making games began by making source engine maps for a Garry's Mod community. I eventually moved on to learn Unity after realizing Source Engine's limitations. Since then, I have been working with different indie teams developing experimental projects covering a variety of mediums. Over the years, I have learned quite a bit about the 'dos' and 'don'ts' of the game development process. My interest peaked in programming due to the puzzle-like nature of solving problems. I fancy making powerful and dynamic systems that other developers can use. Today I am still looking to create fun and intriguing experiences for any who play my games, as well as to expand my knowledge of game creation.
Easily my most complex project, and the one I take most pride in. With over three years of pure solo development time, the aim of this project was to be a successor to Team17's Worms Armageddon. It is a multiplayer turn based artillery strategy game. Back-end systems created include custom deterministic physics, destructible bitmap terrain, versatile weapon system, replay and networking system.
The Tower - The Order of XII
Working with a client, this is the first game I helped get to Steam as a paid product. As such, not only did I have to worry about making the game playable, but also polished and presentable on different platforms. As such, I implemented Steam API features such as achievements and cloud saving, controller support, as well as all other programming required for gameplay and cutscenes.
A mixture of tower defense and card game, Card Defense was made in one week for GameBoy Jam 5. The jam rules limited the screen resolution and color palette to just four colors. Every pixel is super important. The project's overall score in the jam was seriously hurt due to the lack of audio. Still, the gameplay score was 74th out of 402 entries. While this project did not reach the strategic depth desired, the mixture of genres is promising and will probably be explored further in the future.
Brickris Tetout
Try to clear rows like regular ol' Tetris, but a ball flies around the board, wreaking havok on the player's plans by placing or removing blocks! With a team of four, I was the primary programmer and Unity expert. Another game created in 72 hours, this time for Ludum Dare 41. The theme of the jam was "Incompatible Genres".
The More you arm
A game about a lazy man who lost his TV remote. Help him consume sports so he can turn on his TV! This game was made for Ludum Dare 34 in 72 hours. The project scored an amazing 34th place in the innovation category, and 123rd overall, out of 2,867 games.
A multiplayer 2D physics based platformer shooter. This project was a first attempt at making a networked game, and uses what is now Unity's legacy networking system. The game is based off of an old Garry's Mod gamemode that was super fun but not very popular. This project eventually got dropped due to unsolvable input lag and poor networking backend due to inexperience. I learned a lot from this project and its lessons have aided me in more recent projects.
An on-rails shooter and infinite runner concoction. Collect powerups to move to the next area, and fight the balloon dragon. This game was super rushed due to joining a game jam late, and was made on a single day. I did a majority of the programming in this project. Looking back, he considers the coordination between the large number of developers to have been poor. Still, its fun to play at least for 10 minutes or so.
This game was made around the idea that the primary way to kill other players is to physically knock them into hazards. The level design is inspired by old-school quake maps, and is made using the Probuilder Unity extension. For this project, I used Unity's newly implemented uNet system for networking, which there was, at the time, very little documentation for. He eventually ran out of ideas for new meaningful weapons that followed the game's design principle, and thus development ceased.
The idea behind this game is that you only have a single tower type with which to stop enemies. However you are periodically given items that will enhance a tower, changing its stats and behavior. Experiment with mixing and matching different kinds of items to find really potent combinations!
A platformer where your only mobility is to throw yourself. The idea came from a friend of mine, who also did the art for the game, except for the background. I programmed the spiffy animations to be dynamic, and are entirely dynamic based off mouse position relative to the character.