About Me:

Hello! My name is Yalmaz Abdullah, I usually go by Yarrow online and that is also the name under which I have published my games. I am currently an undergraduate student at the University of Alberta perusing my BSc in Computing Science and serving as an Undergraduate Researcher at the EdTekLA Laboratory. I focus primarily on Gameplay and UI programming but recently I have been dabbling in Shader Programming to make better feeling mechanics.

Games have given me a lot. They gave me community and comfort in times I needed it the most. They showed me perspectives I would not have seen otherwise. By making games I hope to help give others some of what games have given to me, and maybe, just maybe make the world a slightly nicer place. I work part time as a teaching assistant and in my spare time I volunteer as the VP External of the Game Development Club where I am responsible for managing external relations and helping new members get started with game development by running workshops and talks.

Projects

Tools used:

Unity, C#

[Re:]Space-And-Bodies

Space and Bodies was a collection of art works that I made from Sep-Dec 2022. They are an exploration of various anxieties and an attempt at reconciliation with different facets that define me. It was meant for display at the UAlberta DSC therefore [Re:] provides a version of the original collection that has been adapted to a more accessable format and also provides demo scenes showing off enhanced versions of the various shaders and render features I developed for this project.

#GameDev #Rendering #Shaders

Tools used:

Unity, C#, Figma, Illustrator, Photoshop, Git

Do You’r Job

For this project I wanted to get my hands dirty with shader programming as well as unity’s UI system. Which is why I thought it would be really fun if the UI/UX played a central role in how you interacted with the mechanics of the game. So I went with the idea of making a faux desktop environment where players could play a handful of mini-games. It was also partly a way to vent the frustration and pressures of the past year of univeristy and COVID.

#GameDev #Gameplay #UI