Scott Rogers | NE0SPACE
GRub lovers - September 2025
Alt link: https://bee-s.itch.io/grublovers
Grub Lovers is a short cooking game similar to games like Papa's Pizzeria. You play as the sole employee manning the store as they're forced to work after-hours when all the... weird stuff happens.
It was made for the Texas Game Jam 2025 between the the evenings of September 26th and 28th. Only 2 days! Shoutouts to the other 5 members of my team, who's work really helped to bring this to life.
There's not much to say about my contributions. I did help proofread the writing and contribute some other ideas, but the majority of my time was spent recording, editing, synthesizing, and mastering the SFX. There's only about 27 in total (the page only says 24 because it was written before the last 3 were needed), but some of them did take longer than anticipated due to technical issues on my end. I also made the ambient background drone myself. The jazz music, however, is just a copyright free track I got online due to lack of time.
On a minor note; this also marks the first project I've used Reaper for! I did a lot of the learning/setup/testing on my own well before this, so the only issues I had were getting used to the workflow and some technical ones.
Ne0's custom stuff - may 2024
Link to mod:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3247931395
A small mod I made for the indie game, World of Horror.
Contains 11 enemies and 10 events. The mod is themed entirely around different in-jokes within my friend group, and written to still fit within the setting of World of Horror.
I really enjoyed this game. Enough so for me to 100% it and join the official discord. To my surprise, I discovered there was a whole modding community for the game already there. Given that around the time I finished the game I was close to graduating university and could use some more personal projects on my portfolio, I decided to delve into modding myself.
Fast forward about a year, and I still hadn't started on anything. After some of my friends revealed some mods they had made, I was inspired to finally start working on this thing. Took me about 4 to 5 months to finish, given I was working on it in-between other projects.
Learning how to mod this game wasn't too difficult. I did have to figure out how to work with an entirely new engine, but I got plenty of help from people in the official discord. I also found an old modding tool - NetOfHorror, created by KunLiberated over on GitHub - that I ended up using to create the base code for all my events and enemies. It's pretty outdated, is no longer updated, and has issues saving files, but remained an invaluable tool for this project.
The coding ended up being the easy part. What really took the most time was creating all the art assets. I wanted to get as close to the base game's artstyle as I could. Since a lot of the art in World of Horror are photographs converted into the 1-bit style, I created a 1-bit image Photoshop template based off a few different tutorials I found online. This ended up being the basis for about 75% of the art made for this mod, with the rest being drawn purely from scratch in Pixelorama (a freeware Asperite equivalent).
For the art I did convert, I went in and manually touched up the shading and line art to get everything looking good. This process was what took the longest out of everything. Still, the conversion template did save me a LOT of time, and this mod would have taken much longer to finish if I didn't use it.
I actually finished the mod back in March of 2024, but never got around to uploading as I wanted to check with one of my friends if they were OK with me publishing this mod since it contains an enemy that's loosely based off them. Luckily for me, steam workshop support was implemented around the time I finally got the OK, which made uploading this mod much easier.
I'm really happy with how this turned out. The reception to it seems positive overall, so maybe sometime in the future I may continue to add to it. Might even make a few custom mysteries.
Gnomewhere to go but down! - January 2024
Gnomewhere to Go but Down! is a 2D platformer shmup that got 2nd place in the January 2024 Clover Jam over on Itch.io. This was my first ever game jam that I participated in, and it still is one of the best ones I've done to date. My role in the project had me drafting concept art for enemies and bosses, storyboarding, assisting with art assets, and creating all the in-game SFX.
While not all of my work made it into the current build, I was still able to get some more experience working with other game developers, which was one of the main goals I had set for myself going into this project.
Alt link: https://kaeseling.itch.io/gnome-game
I originally pitched the idea as more akin to the Touhou games or ZeroRanger, but that eventually shifted into making a 2D platformer shmup similar to the Metal Slug series. The setting also was partially mine. It stems from an idea I had prior to the jam about people digging downwards to reach the sky and the theme of the jam being "beneath the surface".
The story was meant to follow Stinko (our lovingly-named protagonist) as she delved into the mines search of treasure (and possibly fame too). By the second level, she was meant to accidentally squish the gnome king upon entrance, only to then spend the entire level escaping the gnome kingdom, culminating in a boss fight against the gnome prince's giant pet frog. The final level was supposed to be set along the underside of the world, on the border between the land above and the sky below. Stinko would've traversed across hanging platforms and buildings crafted into the ground above, where she would eventually reach a giant, hanging palace. There, she would fight against the gnome prince in his giant, porcelain mech. After beating him the ending would play in which she discovers that the gnomes' treasure is a plastic lawn flamingo and takes it home anyway since it's better than nothing.
Unfortunately, none of this made it into the final build due to time constraints - which is unfortunate as these parts were where a majority of my work ended up being. While everyone in the jam had originally agreed to resume production of the game at some point, everyone ended up getting caught up in other projects and those plans fizzled out.
That being said, I still got a lot out of working on this game. I got the experience working in a team that I was looking for, make some connections with some really talented people, was able to practice creature design, learned a few pixel art techniques, and got some more experience creating SFX. All in all, I had a lot of fun working with everyone. Who knows? Maybe I'll be able to work with them some more in the future.
Wallace and his farm - 2023
Wallace and His Farm is a short, point-and-click Gamemaker game. In it, you follow Wallace as he tries to clean up after a terrible storm that ran through his farm the previous night. While corralling one of his animals, he stumbles upon Bob who had accidentally locked himself in the bathroom of an abandoned gas station. Now, he has to both figure out how to rescue Bob and resolve the chaos around the farm.
I started this game in my Narrative in Games II class and finished as my university's senior project. It took me roughly 8 months total to make by myself, and is the first full game I've made.
Alt link: https://ne0space.itch.io/wallace-and-his-farm
The gameplay was primarily inspired by games such as the Monkey Island series, Day of the Tentacle, and other 90's point-and-click adventure games. Since my most developed skill is my ability to write, I wanted the focus of this game to primarily be about the story. Point-and-click adventure games ended up fitting the bill for showcasing that skill without it being too complicated of a genre for me to learn how to program, since this was my first attempt at making a full game.
As for the story itself, it was mainly formed around Wallace as he was the first thing I came up with. I wanted it to be about him overcoming with his loneliness with the help of the animals he had been caring for, and it was that single idea from which I formed the rest of the story. Of course, there were scope restrictions due to time constraints and how I was still learning GameMaker. I unfortunately couldn't go too far into expanding the story, so I decided to try and format Wallace's development around shorter, individual interactions with each of the animals.
It was definitely a learning experience, as I had to figure out how to make a lot of the systems in the game myself. Probably the hardest part was setting up animations to work alongside the text box system. Specifically, the instancing of sequences mid-game, pausing and playing sequences mid-dialogue, and setting up effects such as room transitions on dialogue finish were the features that I got stuck on the most. I also had some trouble getting the room transitions to work correctly. My solution was a system that stores player co-ordinates in a global array that I now realize is entirely over-complicated and could have been done much easier. At least I know the better way of doing it now.
If I had more time or know-how, I would have added music in-place of the ambience currently present. I decided to go with ambience because - at the time of making this - I wasn't comfortable enough with composition to do it yet, I didn't have the connections (or money) needed to hire someone to make music, nor I did like 99% of royalty-free music (I still don't). I think music would have definitely added a lot to the game, and it's probably the one thing I wish I could have done.
Nevertheless, I'm pretty happy with how it all turned out. I learned how to do a lot, and the knowledge I gained making this has helped me greatly in other projects.
