Tiny Mass Games is a Massachusetts indie game initiative that aims to make small games, released at a three month cadence. I’ve been working on Tiny Mass Games projects since the groups inception at the beginning of 2023, though only released a single project so far.

Superspace (Q3 2023)

Superspace is a web-socket multiplayer game created over the course of three months by me and my old friend and former coworker John Tuttle. John was one of the first people I ever worked with way back at Golden Goose Games. We worked on a relatively short project to create a Flash MMO prototype for leapfrog. I handled the outer MMO pieces and John created a series of minigames that reported back to the main game.

The game was build with a full authoritative server written from scratch in Golang and a thin client written in Godot.

Time Dog (Q2 2023)

Though not officially released, Time Dog got pretty far into production. It was intended to be a time-traveling Point and Click adventure similar to Day of the Tentacle. The link above is to a relatively long demo of the one puzzle sequence we implemented. Jason Mark helped with some design and created the majority of the art. I did all of the programming and worked on a few of the simpler assets! It turns out MagicaVoxel is pretty easy to use and a ton of fun!

Rebirth (Q1 2023)

In Q1 i learned a lot but produced very little. There exists a game where you shoot bullets out of your chest and 3D animated monsters walk at you. You can technically kill them. Its ugly and really not very far along. This was my first Unreal game from scratch and there were a lot of bits to learn. Here are some of the things I experimented with and learned:

  • I used Metahuman and generally learned how that worked.
  • I Used animation re-targetting to be able to apply UE4/5 default model animations to the Metahuman.
  • I used NVidia’s voice-to-facial animation to get characters to correctly lip-sync lines.
  • I also learned a lot about various core Unreal systems such as behavior trees.

Overall it was great as a learning experience, and I wish I had taken it farther. I’ll leave you with a silly video of the main character in a broken state that happened early on before I figured out the animation retargetting.