Eric Laputka

Welcome!

Hey, I'm Eric Laputka. A game designer and University of Connecticut Alumni. I am an indie game designer who has worked with multiple studios including Playnet Inc., Pyrebug Studios, and SupKal Games. In addition, I have even participated in 4 Game jams with a 5th on the horizon! My skills include working in virtual reality, scripting, lighting, modeling, design, and leadership. I am also an accomplished solo developer who has won an award for excellence in my passion project, Pizza Time. To show my passion, I became President of the game design club at the University of Connecticut, which allowed me to help and show others the joy of making games! Creating games that challenge me is what I live for, and seeing all the players who enjoy my experiences is what inspires me! Just check my portfolio and you’ll see what I mean!

My Work

Pizza Time

Pizza Time was my senior project for the University of Connecticut BFA program. It won an award for excellence at the BFA showcase during April of 2022. Pizza Time is a 3d platformer heavily influenced by the 3d platformers during the Nintendo 64 era, like Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie, and Conker's bad fur day. The plot of the game is that you are a slice of pizza that has to travel to the past in order to save his world from the corrupted pineapple pizza. To see my full devlog of this game, click here

A Touch of Sugar: Critter Creator

I worked with SupKal Games to create this fun experience. The experience is a fun relaxing character creator-like game (similar to the miis), where you create little pastry spirits called “Ovenlings”. I was the backbone of the actual character creator where I made the character creator system, as well as rigging the characters for animation. It was an exciting project that started during the Autumn 2024 cozy game jam and we wanted to take more time and release it as its own thing. This experience was used as an excuse to learn the Godot engine. Overall I had a great time creating the experience, along with working as a team with SupKal Games!

Match Breakers

Match Breakers was made during the GMTK 2023 game jam and after placing 722 out of 6842 total games is now being picked back up for polish and to see how far we can take this game in a full month of work. It is a take on the rhythm game genre where you are playing as Anti-Cupid, a bartender set on ruining a series of dates that a patron is about to embark on. Using the arrow keys, match the inputs in order to decrease the potency of your love beverages in order to ensure the dates go poorly. There are two types of arrows that can appear. Depending on your success, one of two things can happen. If you are successful in ruining the date, Orion's date will leave, a new character will take their place, and the game continues. If you are unsuccessful, the two will have found love which will result in a loss. Do your best to ruin all three dates in a row!

World War II Online/ChokePoint

I am working at Playnet Studios as a Level designer as well as a Game designer. Most of what I am currently working on is classified at the moment, meaning I won’t be able to show it off as of yet. I am excited, however, to share that the assets, levels, and code I am working on is making great headway, and has been an amazing learning experience so far. Stay tuned for more information!

Mojmi

I worked with fellow entrepreneurs Charlety Macedo and Nima Badizadegan on an application called Mojmi. The plan was to be a platform for avatars and avatar creation that would be used universally. In addition, it would be able to use AI to match the facial movements to your audio clips. This means you would be able to make a digital version of yourself that could be used in serious settings like meetings and promotional videos, along with an avatar for Facebook or Snapchat. The project is currently on hold but we are still in the prototyping phase with some of the concepts I created above.

Wisdom of Water Interactive Map

The Wisdom of Water interactive map had me working as a team for the Eco Peace organization. The goal of this project is to spread awareness of the Jordan River water crisis by making an interactive map. We achieved this by recreating the river along with three unique site locations along the river in unity. The map has information along with a slider to show the water level depletion throughout time to show what humans have done and the two projected futures depending on if we help or not.

Gatekeeper

Gatekeeper is an interactive virtual reality play that I worked on with Kenneth Thompson and Vincent Tycer as an independent study. The play is based off the events of gamer gate and involves 360 video as well as a virtual world. My task was to work on one of the scenes where I modeled a cave and a bar, set up the lighting and timeline, and coded the events. It was a task that I didn’t have much to go off of, but I believe the product came out great!

Beettalion

Beettalion is a virtual reality card game combined with a tower defense game. You face head to head attacking your opponent while also defending from his attacks. Honey is the currency for all your actions, like drawing and playing cards, so using your honey wisely is the key to victory. Do you build your base and save up strong attacking cards, or do you go on an all out attack in order to secure a quick and decisive victory? The choice is yours!

Castle Adventure

Castle adventure is a game I worked on with a fellow developer. We both wanted to try out the Roblox engine and create a simple platformer in it. You will embark on an adventure past treacherous terrain in order to reclaim your rightful place as ruler. Do you have what it takes to reclaim the throne?

Color Tool

This color tool was a tool I made in Unity. It can be used in the editor and is based on the Adobe Color Picker. You are able to take a base color and the tool will be able to output color schemes such as monochromatic, complementary, split complementary, triad, etc… This was one of my assignments in my advanced scripting class and it is a good demonstration of my scripting and problem-solving abilities.

Scrapshoot

Scrapshoot is a real-time strategy game mixed with tower defense elements made by Pyrebug Studios. The game started as just a game jam game but later formed into a game released on Steam. I am working on this by adding a single-player story mode where I expand on gameplay while reusing and expanding on existing assets and ideas.

Game Jams

Plunderful Voyage:
Global Game Jam 2021

I did this game jam with the Pyrebug team and worked on some of the game design, and coding. We made this in 36hrs and this was my first game jam. The theme was lost & found with the main gameplay loop being similar to a crazy taxi. You go from location to location doing tasks with random world events going on as you sail the sea.

Die Trying:
Game Makers toolkit GameJam 2022

I did this game jam with the Pyrebug team and worked on some of the coding, ai, level/game design, and some modeling. We made this in 36hrs and fought with Unity the whole time. A lot of our team members could not work on the game or had limited access because Unity was acting up. Regardless we were able to make a top-down zombie shooter where you fight off zombies. The main gimmick was the weapons you used were decided on a die that would roll for a new gun whenever you ran out of ammo. There were 3 levels, get to the end, capture the flag, and race to the finish.

Acorn Golf:
Global Game Jam 2023

I did this game jam solo in 36hrs. I was able to code all the mechanics, model all the scenery and props, and design the level. The theme of this game jam was “Rooted” and I was able to make a physics-based golf game where the acorn can root itself into the ground to move the obstacles out of the way. The game is very janky, but I am proud of what I was able to accomplish by myself in such a small time frame.

Match Breakers
GMTK Game Jam 2023

I did this game jam with a rag-tag group of friends as part of the GMTK Game Jam 2023. I am proud of my team and how this project came out. I am happy I was able to work with such a talented team where we were able to place 772 out of 6842 total submissions and were in the top 200 for presentation. The theme was “roles reversed” so we created a rhythm game off that. The game was an overall success and despite me being the only one who had access to the unity project, we all worked brilliantly as a team!

Extras

render of another angle of same bedroom that I textured

render of another angle of same pool that I textured