Jon Allen

This is a website for me to write about various projects, mostly personal and other things that I find interesting and want to write about. This website was originally made using the Jekyll framework and then rewritten using a custom PHP website builder that I wrote. If you're interested about how I have written the website, check it out on GitHub here.

EES RobotJan - May 2018

During College, I coded and helped build a self navigating robot for the Engineering Education Scheme (EES), using an Arduino for the processing unit and a ultrasound censor for collision detection. The body was made using two sheets of acrylic and a Lego frame to support the motors and track frames.

Turbo RacingSep - Dec 2018

For my A level Computer Science coursework, I made a racing game in Unity on my Windows-bootcamped MacBook. It had multiple vehicles to select and a rally mode. At some point I want to remake this game now I have more computing power than a Macbook but I want to make all of my own assets, I might wait until after university but I'm not sure yet.

Modding Mario Kart Wii

Aug - Oct 2020

Little unusual I know, but I've had a lot of fun messing around with the Wii filesystem and modding the first game I became good at, and is still a really good game today despite the dated graphics, but thats nothing a pc emulator can't fix, which I also set up.

Route Planner Web App

Feb - May 2021

For the group project module I took in my second year of university, we made a website application for planning a road trip and recommending locations of interest along the route picked. I programmed the main recommendation algorithm and wrote PHPUnit tests for it and the location sorting algorithm.

ArcanoidMar - May 2021

This assignment for my game design module in my second year of university has been the most enjoyable so far. It was a very open assignment, so as long as I had a basic implementation of the old arcade game Arcanoid, I'd pass the assignment, but I added a few extra features for fun, and it was fun to improve my game development practices from the last game I made with Unity, Turbo Racing, for my A level coursework.

JavaScript GameMay 2021

One of my assignments for my Scripting Languages module in my second year of university required me to make sort of a create-your-own dungeon hunter game in JavaScript. It wasn't particularly difficult, but I thought it was fun and interesting and I learnt how to do some basic GIF editing with this project.

GuitarTabTool

Nov 2021 - Feb 2022

I started getting back into playing guitar during 2021, and wanted to make tab sheets of songs I learnt from YouTube in a way that wasnt unnecessarily difficult or costing me money, so I just made my own tool in UE5 (yes I know a game engine isn't the usual way to make this sort of thing but I'm good at C++ now and didn't want to re-learn JavaScript so here we are).

Horde Shooter Game

Feb - April 2023

For my continuous assignment for my Game Development module of my third year at uni I decided to make a top-down perspective horde survival shooter game, sort of similar to the dead-ops arcade mode of Call of Duty: Black Ops.

UE5 Kinematic Vehicle Plugin

Oct 2022 - May 2023

For my final year dissertation at uni, I decided to write a plugin for Unreal Engine 5 that adds a modular and easy-to-use vehicle simulation using kinematics to rival the physically simulated Chaos vehicle plugin. This was quite the ambitious project, but I am very proud of the result, especially the animation system that I may return to in the future to continue development of.