Jeremy Elkayam

Platforms: Game Boy Advance
Language: C++
Framework: Butano
Winter 2022-Spring 2023

A port of the 2003 Flash game TROGDOR! to the Game Boy Advance. In this game, you control the mighty dragon TROGDOR the BURNiNATOR, and squish the peasants of the land in order to achieve BURNINATION. With your fire-breathing powers, you can destroy the thatched-roof cottages and complete the game's 100 levels. But be careful! Archers and knights are sworn to protect the countryside and will kill Trogdor if given a chance.

My port of the game contains everything from the original Flash game, recreated in C++ using Butano (a homebrew GBA game engine). I also added some new features including:

• saving your progress
• a tutorial
• the TROGHAMMER, a new, more powerful enemy inspired by the board game version of Trogdor.
• adjustable options such as volume and difficulty parameters

In addition to all of this, I also crunched down the game into a demo that used just 256kb of data and could therefore run entirely in the GBA's RAM. This meant it could be transferred over link cable and/or played without a cartridge!

Platforms: PC
Language: C++
Framework: SFML
Winter 2020

In late 2020, I had a lot of free time due to the pandemic and decided to remake Warriors, a game that my younger brother and I had created in Scratch when we were in our young teens. We had originally made the game in Scratch and styled it after an Atari 2600 game. I made this remake in SFML because I'd used it for my game dev class two years earlier.

This is a game where you move around a field and kill baddies as more and more come at you. Occasionally, health potions appear on the field. Once per game, a bomb will appear that kills all enemies on screen, and a ring will appear that drains the life of enemies you kill and restores it to you. As you play, more enemy warriors appear and fewer health potions appear. I also coded my own key bindings, which was challenging, particularly in regard to saving and loading the player's settings.

Since I'd already developed an earlier version of the game in the Atari style, I decided to model my version after the machine they played games on across the pond in the late 70s/early 80s, the ZX Spectrum. I'm particularly proud of how I mimicked the Spectrum's color-clash effect. I also added support for up to 8 players (our original Scratch version only had 4).

Platform: Linux
Language: C++
Framework: SFML
Winter 2018

This was my final project for Intro to Game Design and Game Development, which I took at William & Mary in fall 2018. We made a functional, junk food-themed tower defense game as 4 students whose only C++ experience was remaking Pong. And we did it in only 2 1/2 months! Despite many the many challenges and hurdles that come with being first-time developers, we programmed the whole thing soup-to-nuts and did our own art as well.

This game has 4 different types of towers, 3 types of enemies, and 3 tiers of upgrades for each tower (e.g. cola -> energy drink), with the option of upgrading between 2 separate types of tower for the final level (e.g. energy drink -> slushie OR gravy). Additionally, you can upgrade a tower's individual stats (e.g. range, rate of fire, etc). The maps and waves of enemies are also procedurally generated based on parameters the user provides.

Despite time constraints and challenges, we were able to implement all of the features from our initial design document, even if we weren't able to polish everything as much as we wanted. This was also my first time making my own art for a game (I did the art for all of the towers and enemies). Despite my limited experience in visual art and the limited image sizes we had to deal with, I think I made art that was decently expressive.

Platform: Android
Language: Java
Spring 2019

This was the final project for my Entrepreneurship in Computer Science class, which I took in the spring of my junior year at W&M. I worked on coding this with 3 other students.

Have you ever experienced the tedium of taking attendance at the beginning of a class or other event? How about having to sit around for the first 5-10 minutes as the instructor goes through the entire class roster? We created Entella to solve this problem.

Entella uses facial recognition to check the attendance of an entire room of people with a single photograph. As a host/instructor, you can check attendance records for your entire class, and as a student you can check the records to make sure your attendance is recorded properly.