Hi! I'm Alecia Kuyser, a Masters Graduate from the University of St. Andrews.

You may also find my work under the pseudonym "Apples the Hero"
or by my University username, "dck4"

Portfolio

This was a 4th year project for the "Principles of Computer Communication Systems" module. This project was an open-ended interactive presentation about the future of an internet-related thing - I chose to create a website, as I wanted to challenge myself to make a responsive, interactive website without scripts or frameworks. The time given to do the project was too short to fully deliver on the "responsive" part of the project, but it was well-graded and I achieved my goal of making it aesthetically pleasing with nice animations using only html and css.

This was a 5th year project for the "Interactive Software and Hardware" module, which I did with a teammate in about a week. The project was done in React, with a firebase database supplied by the school as a backend (which is why a working version is not available). I was responsible for the design, and most of the programming (particularly the aesthetic components of the programming - alignment, interactions, layout etc.).

Below are the wireframes I made when designing the project.

This was a 4th year project for the "Computer Graphics" module, in which I used p5.js to create a 3D renderer using Phong and Lambertian shading to render faces from the 3D mesh data provided by the school. The project also required that the three displayed faces can be "combined" to create a synthesized face, based on a ratio specified by the user. Rendering is done using the "triangle" function of p5.js, doing some maths to calculate vertex shading.

This is a game made in a weekend for a game jam, "72 Pin Connector Retro Jam", with a retro theme, which I worked on with a team of 3 people. I took the role of lead designer and team leader, using the technical limitations of the Atari 2600 to inspire the idea of having a vertical level mirrored across the two sides of the screen, with two players each controlling a character on one side to race each other to the top. The game was well-received, though a lack of time to sufficiently play-test the levels led to some of them being unbeatable, as well as a few bugs, ultimately resulting in a low overall ranking. The judges praised the originality of the concept, and the extra attention to detail paid to replicate the limitations of the Atari 2600, such as the limit of 1 colour per line for the background and sprites, and the pixel stretching to match the non-square pixels of the system.

This was the final 4th year project for the "Video Games" module. This was an individual project which required the use of the Processing graphics engine to make a game of your own specification. The class was taught to use the Java version of Processing, but this requires the use of the Processing IDE, which misses a lot of features present in other IDEs, and has several other problems so I decided to use p5.js instead, the javascript port of Processing. The idea I came up with was a metroidvania style game with horror elements and twin-stick shooter style controls, centered around the titular "lamp". The game is dark, requiring the use of the lamp, with limited fuel, to give the player vision, as well as to slow down the enemies, as the player explores to find items such as better lamps, extra fuel, and magic tomes to help them escape. I composed some simple music and sound effects for the game using FamiTracker, a music making tool emulating the sound of the Nintendo Entertainment System, to match the retro-esqeue aesthetic.