Mark Redman
Software Engineer
Hello there! I'm a software engineer with experience in medical technology and video game development. I was blessed with computer science teachers in high school who helped me say my first "Hello, World!" to software, logic, and computation, and during college, I was inspired by family members in healthcare to start my software engineering career at a medical device company.
All the while, I have reflected on the wide range of video games I played with my two older brothers growing up, sparking my interest in game development. As a result, I have dedicated my personal time to learn the ins and outs of Vermintide modding and game engines such as Unity and Godot. I aspire to create games that will positively impact others, and to that end I really jumped in by founding Red Prism Games LLC and publishing my first app ChromaSphere. Please check out my work at Red Prism Games and my personal projects below.
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ChromaSphere
Challenge your spatial reasoning skills in this mobile puzzle game inspired by games like Flow-Free but now in 3D!
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Idle Tic Tac Toe
Collect gum and build a Tic-Tac-Toe empire in this unique idle game!
Personal Projects
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Enigma
Mysterious forces impart their strength upon the Ubersreik Five in the form of powerful cards.
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RatNet
The traitor-rat, Pusfume, brings a communications channel between Vermintide and Discord.
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Life's Hard Everywhere
In the wise words of Markus Kruber, life is hard everywhere. See the proof in the bloodstains left all over by other players.
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Vermintide Analytics
Slay the rats, then view your stats: A statistical approach to improving your Vermintide performance.
Languages/Technologies Used:
- C#
- Unity
- Blender
Challenges Faced:
- Integration of 3rd-party frameworks to implement ads, in-app purchases, achievements, etc.
- Design of flexible interface to support wide variety of devices
- Implementation of unique algorithm which generates engaging puzzles on a spherical "board"
- Setup of server which verifies in-app purchases and serves daily content
Years ago I played a lot of the mobile puzzle game "Flow-Free" in which you connect dots of the same color on a 2D grid without crossing lines. Inspired by this, I decided to take this type of puzzle into 3D by putting it on a sphere.
Connect the colorful balls with lines, but they cannot cross!
Challenge your spatial reasoning skills with this twist on the classic connect-the-dots puzzle game, now in 3D. Rotate the sphere and draw lines in ways you never thought possible. Prepare yourself for a series of mind-bending puzzles that require careful planning.
ChromaSphere features:
* 600+ unique puzzles from Beginner to Grandmaster for dozens of hours of fun
* 12 new puzzles every day!
* Tunnels which connect distant points, allowing you to bend space itself to your whim!
Can you become a ChromaSphere Grandmaster?
Languages/Technologies Used:
- C#
- Unity
Challenges Faced:
- Providing an engaging idle game design, balancing user input and automated elements
- Reuse and optimization of flexible interface toolset from my first mobile game, Chromasphere
- Creation of hand-drawn icons and textures
- Streamlining integration of 3rd-party frameworks to implement ads, in-app purchases, achievements, etc. based on ChromaSphere
After releasing ChromaSphere, I researched more modern mobile game monetization strategies, specifically regarding more common usage of rewarded ads. I have spent time playing idle games, and decided that I could put my new experience in the mobile games industry to use by applying a unique theme to a well-loved genre.
It's your first day back at school - but you're not here to study. You're here to rise through the ranks of classroom clout by building the most ridiculous, unstoppable network of Tic Tac Toe players the school has ever seen.
You've recruited a few 1st Graders to play games of Tic Tac Toe for Gum - and business is booming. Coach them, upgrade them, Profit.
Whether you're checking in every few minutes or letting your empire grow while you're away, the school halls keep buzzing with the scribbles of Tic Tac Toe and the sounds of victory.
Languages/Technologies Used:
- Lua
- Stable Diffusion
- Gimp
Challenges Faced:
- Design of a flexible but consistent card game system which allows for others to define new cards
- Generation of unique-looking art for each card
- Balance of individual cards
One day I jokingly mentioned, "what if Vermintide had a card game?" Over the next couple of days, I incubated the idea and formulated a plan. A few months later, Enigma is a fully-fledged mod that expands Vermintide's gameplay in a fun way by allowing players to design a deck of cards and play these cards for in-game benefits. A significant part of my design goals included making it as easy as possible to define cards, and to enable other mods to define cards, allowing players to expand the content in a modular fashion.
Throughout the development of Enigma, I was able to draw inspiration from several card-based games I have played such as Slay the Spire, Monster Train, Hearthstone, and Magic the Gathering. Having experience playing these games gave me a good starting point for aspects of the mod such as the default card lifecycle, card keywords, and card synergies.
Enigma is a project I have learned a lot from, and I enjoy trying to provide players with a flexible and fun new experience. I try to always be available to help troubleshoot issues that players encounter, and to help anyone design new cards.
Languages/Technologies Used:
- Lua
- C#
- Discord Bot API
- Blender
Challenges Faced:
- Properly reacting to player session state changes
- Understanding Discord Bot API rate-limits and accounting for them in the bot's behavior, while still displaying effecively "live" player session information
- Determining which gameplay-changing mods that are active
Having been involved in a handful of Vermintide Mod communities for a few years, I noticed that there was no good way to know who is playing and what mods they are playing with. Many players stick to their own friend group or post messages in LFG (Looking-For-Group) channels any time they want to play. I created RatNet to provide players a way to publicize their session, and for Discord users to have a single place to look for what active sessions they could join.
For each session host that has the RatNet mod enabled, the Discord Bot will put a temporary message in a dedicated channel. This message includes information that players might like to know before joining that session, such as mission, difficulty, other players, player careers, and game balance mods. The message also includes a button to join the session (or request to join, depending on the host's settings), streamlining the join process without players in the lobby having to send steam invites.
Languages/Technologies Used:
- Lua
- Supabase (Online PostreSQL Database)
- NodeJS
- Discord Bot API
- Blender
Challenges Faced:
- Learning how to use Supabase
- Supporting Vermintide tournaments to handle player deaths in a unique way
- Learning Discord Bot API to listen for INSERT operations and display a live feed of player deaths
I love the Dark Souls games, and I thought it would help bring Vermintide's modded realm to life if players could see bloodstains where other players have died throughout the game's missions. Players with the Life's Hard Everywhere mod enabled will automatically leave their own bloodstains when they die, and they will see the most recent bloodstains left behind each time they load a mission. The exact number of bloodstains shown depends on preference, up to 10,000.
After I was finished with the primary goal of the mod, I wanted to contribute to a feeling of connectedness in the modded community. What I added was a Discord bot which would create messages in a dedicated channel when a player with Life's Hard Everywhere enabled. Discord users could also react to these messages and the Discord bot would forward these reactions to the player.
Ultimately, I never thought the scope of the Life's Hard Everywhere mod should include the Discord integration. Once I completed my other mod that interacts with Discord, RatNet, I removed the Discord feature so that it simply provides players with the bloodstains. I was able to apply many of the things that I learned from Life's Hard Everywhere when making RatNet, so it was far from a waste, even if it's not still part of the mod's vision!
Languages/Technologies Used:
- Lua
- C#
- WPF
Challenges Faced:
- Learning how to work with several parts of Vermintide's gameplay loop
- Design WPF application to show players statistics in formats that help them understand their gameplay
- Design a highly compact storage schema for a large number of in-game events
Vermintide Analytics is a mod for Vermintide 2 which records events and statistics about a player's gameplay, to be viewed in an external application called Vermintide Analyzer. While this wasn't my first Vermintide mod, it was my first big one. I was still new to modding Vermintide, so I wanted it to be something that would provide an opportunity to learn about Vermintide's code base while utilizing my general coding skills.
I originally devised an extremely compact format to store the player's data, since it would be storing thousands of events for each game. I designed the format by deciding the number of bits needed for each field and packing them in as tightly as possible, resulting in custom binary files. This relied on mods having access to write to the filesystem, which was removed shortly after my mod was released. Since that capability was removed, I had to move the data to the game's existing console logs, which takes up a lot more space but won't stop working any time soon.
The Vermintide Analyzer is a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) app that contains many numerical views and comparison tools that players might want in order to understand how to improve their gameplay. I was already familiar with WPF, so I was able to get started quickly, but it was a chance for me to design an interface on my own and learn about some smaller frameworks that work with WPF. Players can view detailed stats and charts for specific games, get an overview of how they perform with various careers, and compare stats from sets of games selected using a highly flexible filtering system.