Renting Made Easy is a rental listings website developed for my final project as part of my Master's degree in TUDublin. It was a team project with 5 other students. It was developed over the course of 12 weeks including an extensive evaluation process. It used open-source crime data from OpenBaltimore to provide crime-safety ratings for listings based on their geo-location.

I took the role of Lead Frontend Developer and UX Designer. I created the initial mockups using pen and paper, then proceeded to make simple mockups using Figma. The designs went through multiple stages of user evaluation. I did the initial user evaluations to identify issues with accessibility and layouts, and developed a technique which was later used by my teammate who did subsequent user tests.

Material UI was used throughout this project as it enabled fast-paced development and iteration for designs, and helped support accessibility. My main role was developing the bulk of components for the application, and ensuring they were responsive across multiple devices.

The app was deployed to AWS amplify, and used TanStack (React) Query for communication with a Springboot backend and miscellaneous functions deployed to AWS Lambda. I also wrote and deployed an AWS Lambda function which connected to the Google Map API to return nearby services around a listings location. Tanstack was crucial for this as it provided an efficient caching system that reduced the number of API requests to the Google API, reducing cost.

Press Rekord was a final year project developed by a team of five final year Game Design Students at TUDublin. It is an action oriented metroid-vania vertical slice. It featured fast-paced combat, NPC interactions and dialogues, and Quest systems. Taking the role of Kat, a thrill-seeking live streamer, the player fights underground monsters, explores the underground environments, and meets unique characters.

For this project, I took on the role of lead programmer, wherein I was responsible for developing the backbone gameplay systems including a custom event system, quest systems, dialogue systems. I also designed and implemented the final boss encounter and the Fly enemy.

Over the course of this project, I gained valuable skills in C# and game design.

Developing the event system was crucial for this project to work, as it enabled multiple sub-systems to communicate while remaining decoupled from each other. For example, for quests involving specific dialogue trees, those dialogues could raise events while the quest instance could listen to those events and respond to them, i.e. progressing the quest to the next stage.

The dialogue system took advantage of the power of serialized objects. Using serialized objects enabled the implementation of branching dialogue trees without adding too much complexity. The key characteristic of scriptable objects that allowed this was their ability to contain references to other scriptable objects.