Liam Douglas McKenna

About Me

With a logical mind and creative heart, I'm always looking to explore avenues that satisfy both halves of my psyche. That passion for creation led me towards game development, but it was my desire for challenge that made me enamored by its technical aspects.

Finding that passion has fueled a deep motivation to impact the field. My entire year has been spent predomimantly conducting research, first for UF's computer graphics lab, SurfLab, and now studying abroad in Japan helping Kyoto University's computer vision research department improve their Unreal Engine simulations.

Following the completion of my degree, I'm aiming to enter the field of game development, either through a technical engineering or design role. In the meantime, I'll be keeping my thoughts filed on my blog, LEE_SPEAK, and continuing work on my research and personal endeavors.

Project Showcase

All-Purpose Graphics Playground (APGP)

APGP serves as my custom environment to test and implement various aspects of real-time 3D graphics rendering. As a repository, it serves as a personal exercise in making a publicly-accessible codebase that can easily run in a system-agnostic manner, along with simply being an archive of my efforts.

Repository

LEE_SPEAK

LEE_SPEAK is a blog created for a handful of reasons, but chiefly as a personal outlet. Anyone willing to share their opinions on the internet must believe to some extent their thoughts are indeed worth sharing, so posts there always aim to be some flavor of original, insightful, entertaining, and/or personal. Feel free to read my thoughts on gaming, music, sweets, and more.

Personal Blog

PowerLine

PowerLine is a multiplayer Minecraft minigame fully developed over the course of two weeks. Through its development time I learned the hefty value of playtesting and player feedback. The game was approved by and published to the popular and selective Minecraft minigame hosting website, StickyPiston.

Play Game

Topposition

Topposition was originally created as a board game for a class assignment, but eventually turned into an exercise in C++ programming as it became the first game I’ve developed without an engine, written in pure C++, utilizing a single rudimentary graphics library (SDL2). The game boasts a fully procedural terrain generation system, as well as local and online multiplayer. Topposition is still in development but is fully playable locally.

Game Showcase

SteamQuack.com

SteamQuack.com serves as an entertaining way for PC gamers to find new games based on their personal tastes. Users submit their Steam profile, and a taste profile is generated based on the data available through Steam’s API. The user can then tell the site’s host, a literal “quack doctor” named Ducktor Gamez, exactly what they do and don’t care about when looking for a game, which he will consider before generating game suggestions back to the user.

Visit Site

3D Modeling

In my two 3D modeling courses, I have become thoroughly familiar with the process of 3D modeling and rendering. I’ve modeled a variety of objects, architectures, and human characters, all of which can be seen in this portfolio. My experiences in modeling have been particularly responsible for piquing my interest in the 3D rendering pipeline, as well as graphics processing as a whole.

Full Portfolio

Itch.io Games

Over the course of my tenure at UF, I’ve created several smaller-scale games for various projects. These include game jams, class projects, hackathons, and personal ventures. The process of working with others on these titles has demonstrated and further developed my programming, designing, artistic, and leadership skills. All of these creations can be seen and downloaded on my Itch page.

Itch Page

CPU Ray Tracer

This ray tracer was built 100% from scratch and only utilizes OpenGL to apply the rendered bitmap to a camera-covering texture. It performs all calculations on the CPU and was written in C++. While the code is not available on GitHub, the rendered demo can be found on my YouTube channel.

Demo

Hi! I'm Liam. M.S. in Computer Science, University of Florida