For my thesis, I developed an educational video game titled Cannon Quest. Based around a thought experiment proposed in 1687 by Sir Isaac Newton, Cannon Quest allows players to explore a miniature, 2-dimensional solar system using real physics and gravity. My principle goal was to create an interactive model of orbital motion, with some game/simulation elements. This allows players who are totally unfamiliar with orbital mechanics to gain at least a rudimentary understanding simply by playing the game. While the educational model was my primary goal, care was taken to ensure that Cannon Quest functions as a playable simulator. I developed my own user interface (UI), control setup, and art, as well as integrating music and animation for a more complete user experience. I also spent a significant amount of time balancing the gameplay aspects with the real physics, occasionally sacrificing reality where needed to ensure a better experience. The resulting product is simple and straightforward, while retaining much of the nuances of actual orbital motion. I also developed a website to host Cannon Quest, and better direct my playtesters from a single hub. You can visit this website at www.cannonquest.carrd.co. Alternatively, you can visit https://possiblymatthew.itch.io/cannon-quest or https://github.com/matthewbenjamin22/Cannon-Quest to play the game.

Alife is an event searching and event publishing website written in C# using the MVC software design pattern. Alife aims to offer a platform for student organizations to publish their events while enabling ASU students to browse, search, and filter events based on date, location, keywords, and category tags. Alife can also retrieve events information from the official ASU Event website, parse the keywords of the events and assign category tags to them. Alife project explores many concepts of Distributed Service-Oriented software development, such as server-side development, MVC architecture, client-side development, database integration, web service development and consuming.