Sidekick

Play as the sidekick and solve puzzles to assist the not-so-mighty hero on his quest to save the city of Sidetopia in this futuristic puzzle-adventure game!

Technology Used

Sidekick uses Unity and C#.

Contributions

• Player Movement
• Push/Pull Blocks
• Ramps
• Environmental Asses
• Boss Level Reskins
• Level 3 Design and Construction
• Level 4 Design and Construction
• Level 8 Design and Construction
• Level 12 Initial Design and Construction
• Play Testing
• Bug Fixes

Download the game here!

Beast of The Sea

This is an original game focused on the novel idea of being a pirate at sea. Inspired by Davy Jones and the Flying Dutchman from hit series Pirates of the Caribbean, the player controls the magic ship, the Beast of The Sea to defend their gold from pillaging pirates.

The player is able to realistically sail around, go underwater like the iconic Dutchman, and most importantly, FIRE THE CANNONS!

Technology Used

Beast of The Sea uses Unity and C#.

Contributions

This was a solo project, so I was responsible for every aspect of the game. This includes but is not limited to:

• Programming player movement
• Programming enemy movement
• Programming gold pillaging
• Utilizing EventBus architecture to update the UI
• Implementing the 'Open Fire!' action
• Implementing the 'Go Down' and 'Rise Up' actions
• Programming bounceback and rising collisions to prevent softlocks
• Programming cannonball detection and sinking mechanics for enemies
• Creating a level template
• Designing levels 1-6
• Creating and designing the menu
• Adding background music
• Adding sound effects
• Importing free assets
• Importing free audio
• Importing free-for-personal-use font

Play the game here!

The Legend of Zelda

This is a replica of the 1986 game "The Legend of Zelda" focusing on the first dungeon level. It also comes with a custom level featuring a new mechanic, which can be accessed by pressing "4." Controls include the arrow keys or WASD to move, X to use the sword, Z to use the secondary attack, and spacebar to shuffle between secondary weapons. 1 can also be pressed to turn on godmode. A great introduction to C# and Unity.

Contributions

While this game was a team effort, my partner and I each had our own responsibilities. Mine included but were not limited to:

• Programming the enemy movement
• Implementing the sword and bow
• Implementing the collectibles and programming the enemies to drop them upon death
• Photoshopping existing sprites
• Adding sound effects
• Creating most animations
• Designing the custom pod and broken pod sprites
• Helping design the custom level
• Contributed to play testing and bug fixing
• Overseeing outside play testing and gathering feedback

Play the game here!

Search Engine

Constructed a fully working search engine for Wikipedia pages using Python. Used a MapReduce model within a simulated version of Hadoop (Madoop) to calculate tf-idf values, which were combined with PageRank scores for each query to produce an effective ordering. Used a back-end server to query tf-idf values and combine them with pagerank scores, and a front-end server to display the GUI and any search results in order.

Simulating a Distributed System

Created a multi-threaded Python program that would simulate a MapReduce program. Simulated a manager that would listen for worker messages and send task assignments over TCP, and keep track of alive workers with heartbeats sent over UDP.

Insta485

Created an Instagram clone, dubbed "Insta 485," which went through the following versions:

• V1 - Utilized a python script to read JSON input and display it on static pages using Jinja.
• V2 - Now a server-side dynamic website, Insta485 could use SQLite3 and Flask REST APIs to display templated pages filled in with different data from the database. With a live AWS EC3 instance, Insta485 could be used my multiple users at the same time.
• V3 - Now a client-side dynamic website, Insta485 utilized Javascript and React to bypass the need for a Jinja template. It still utilized SQLite3 and Flask REST APIs for a back-end, and could once again allow for a multiple users via a live AWS EC3 instance.

Image Processing with Neural Networks

Constructed a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a Deep Neural Network (DNN) to identify dog breeds from images. Used supervised learning to train the networks and the Pytorch library to construct the models. Utilized the Grad-CAM algorithm and AUROC scores to evaluate models, and experimented with transfer learning and data augmentation to train a model that balances bias and variances.

Predicting Reddit Post Emotions with SVMs

Constructed an SVM using the scikit-learn framework to classify whether a given Reddit post was "positive" or "negative" in sentiment. Used feature extraction techniques to convert posts into supervised learning training data. Utilized AUROC scores for hyperparameter selection and kernel selection (linear kernel vs quadratic kernel). Utilized squared hinge loss to optimize model on balanced and imbalanced datasets. Utilized one-vs-all methodology to implement a multi-class classifier using binary classifiers.

Digital Forensics

Performed a dead analysis and a live analysis on a dummy computer to collect evidence to put forth a case on a hypothetical individual being guilty or innocent of cyber crimes. Techniques used ranged from SQL injection attacks on a dummy site to a man-in-the-middle attack using an RSA key found via steganography. The "chase" lead to a hidden geocache with travel plans to flee the country, a .onion site of a secret group on the dark web, and even a top-secret Belarussian website.

Application Security

Used assembly code to run malicious code via a target dummy program. Attacks started with simple buffer overflows and increased in difficulty with more defenses, such as data execution prevention (DEP) and address-space layout randomization (ASLR), requiring increasingly complex attacks such as NOP ramps and ROP (Return Oriented Programming) Chains. The project eventually became just a binary file, requiring the use of Ghidra to reverse engineer it into C code.

Network Security

Attacked a dummy network to investigate a cyber attack, starting with finding a suspcious IP using Wireshark. This led to using John the Ripper on Rockyou.txt to find a username with an unsecure password, then using Python to get said user's certificate and eventually crack the Time-based One Time Password (TOTP) to get access to the website and investigate it for evidence of cyber attacks.

Web Security

Attacked a dummy site using a variety of attacks against increasing levels of defense.

SQL Injection

Utilized to log in as any user in the back-end. Performed against no defense, escaping single quotes (replaced with two single quotes), and a SHA-256 hash applied to the password.

Cross-Site Scripting - XSS

Utilized to steal a user's username and most recent search on the site. Performed against no defense, removing "script", removing numerous html tags (script, img, body, style, etc.), and removing some punctuation.

Cross-Site Request Forgery CSRF

Utilized to log a victim onto the dummy site on an attacker's credentials when the user loaded an HTML file. This would allow the potential attacker to monitor the victim's activity on the site. Performed against no defense and token validation via cookie.

Cryptography

Conducted a length extension attack to demonstrate the importance of using a MAC with hashing functions. Generated a hash collision on SHA-1 to show it's not a secure hashing function anymore. Conducted a padding oracle attack to decrypt messages encrypted via Cipher-Block Chaining (CBC). Utilized Bliechenbacher's Attack to construct a forged RSA signature that could be used to conduct unauthorized bank transactions through a dummy bank.

Spaceship Escape

Graph search and route tracing using breadth first search (BFS) and depth first search (DFS) in a 2d maze with a spaceship theme.

Zombie Tower Defense

Using priority queues and implementing templated containers, inheritance and interface programming, and streaming algorithms with zombie defense theme.

Database Query Language

Working with hash tables, managing and creating larger data structures through composition to implement an efficient database query language.

A Day at the Zoo

Implementing optimization algorithms (eg. Traveling Salesperson and Knapsack) to create a program capable of designing the most efficient path to visit every animal given a certain Zoo layout.

Stats

Created a program that could take in a large amount of numbers and calculate statistics for said numbers.

Images

Created a program that would take an image as input and translate and transform it given certain input parameters.

Euchre

Used Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) to simulate a game of Euchre that could be played with other players or against a simple AI.

Web API

Implemented a simple web API using queues.

AI

Created a program to take training data and organize it into a binary search tree to be used to train an AI to predict the subject of dicsussion posts.