Frank Altamirano's Portfolio

A ghosthunting information website for Australian ghosthunters who like visiting locations for paranormal investigations or just going on simple ghost tours.

This is a project I actually had fun with. The objective was simple, create a website of your choosing about anything that you want. As I have always had an affection for all things paranomal, I decided to create a website which devoted itself to ghost tour locations all across Australia. I figured, it would be original, a challenge, and a great way to get other students interested in the topic of understanding the unknown.

Project took me roughly 5 straight days of non stop work, and although it may seem like a simple website, from building a website from scratch (and yes im talking notepad) to the graphic editing to trying to find the most relevant locations of ghost tours across Australia and going through large amounts of broken links took a great amount of time and work.

Thus I present to you Paranormal Australia, hope you enjoy!

A photo / video sharing website where people can share their captured moments with the rest of the world.

Flow Tow was a project undertaken by me in my second year of uni under the unit Web Technologies. The idea was that we had to create a web application that was meant to function in a similar way as Instagram (A photo sharing website). It was a pretty meaty project which we progressed through over the semester in segments.

The web application needed to be able to generate html pages based on information collected from a database. The database used was SQLite, which is lighter version of SQL, yet can be easily transferable to SQL should the need to grow and expand become necessary. It also needed to be able to handle user login sessions and the uploading of images. Lastly each image uploaded and shared, needed to be able to handle comments posted by other users which would be linked to specific photos.

Those items were the requirements of what needed to be achieved. With freedom to go beyond those requirements, I took it upon myself to add video sharing along with photo sharing, and lastly added a rating system which allowed users to vote for individual photos or videos. The logo and stars were both original works created by me along with the background image of the webpage.

This project was probably one of my favourites as it was one of the most challenging, but also very rewarding in being able to see my hardwork realised.

A health food delivery service. Choose from a variety of packages for a health food plan which best suits your dietary needs.

This website was done after I finished university. I did a guided online course which taught me about creating a good responsive website along with good tips about website design as a whole in general.

It took a few days to complete and although I did complete all the code, and added some of my own fixes and tweaks to the code, I still do not consider it to be my own original work. However I do show it for the sole purpose that I can now create similar websites without a guide. A great example of this was applying the knowledge that I learnt and using it to create my new portfolio website.

A simple tip calculator.

A simple website which I created during my own personal learning. Nothing too complicated and gets right to the point about what its purpose is.

The most complicated part you could say was applying the mathematical formula to make sure the calculator gave results which were both correct and formatted accordingly.

Media tracker is an inventory management system for the avid movie or game collector. Very often as collections grow over time, products you own get forgotton about and if your a collector who tends to loan collectables to friends, you lose track of these items as time passes. Media tracker aims at being a solution of collecting and storing your inventory of different media forms such as movies and games, and cataloging them in a digital environment where you can browse through products you own with a simple media collection search or by filtering them based on their genre or platform.

This project started with a simple idea that I had one day about keeping track of my movie and game collection. Although I had the idea, I never really felt I wanted to commit a large amount of time into creating it. However one day my friend needed to learn Angular 2 for work, and I thought this might be a good reason to work on implementing my simple idea using the Angular 2 framework should they have needed help. Also I had another friend who also wanted to learn the framework, so I thought I will use this as an opportunity to reinforce what I already know of Angular 2 while adding a new site to add to my portfolio and possibly grow the site from this simple idea.

Project from start to finish (or at least its current state) took me exactly 1 month to complete. One thing I really came to realise about Angular 2, is that it does not play well with others. However it is a very powerful framework which came sometimes take alot of the jobs of libraries such as jQuery.

It was a good experience using Angular 2, and I feel I am much more adept at using it that my next project might be using it as well.

A space hero defence game where you must defend Earth from the onslaught of incoming asteroids. Build defensive satelites to help aid you in your mission to save Earth.

This game was the biggest project I ever did in all my time at Macquarie University. It was my final capstone unit where I was put into a team comprising of 4 people. We learnt about agile development method and that was the methodology we used throughout the entire project.

I was assigned as the team leader and took the role as lead programmer as it was my greatest strength. One other team member was the designer and wrote up the documentation, and another was the 3d modeller and last member managed the scrum tasks and compiling sounds.

The work I did consumed nearly all my time and consisted of hours and hours of work making up the entire semester. The engine I used was that of Unity which I was already familiar with from earlier projects I created at university. The game came with x-box one controller support and was suppose to consist of several planet levels. Unfortunately we only had enough time for the one level, however all the main game mechanics were in place to be able to add new levels much more easily now that all the foundation is in place.

A short fun game where your the fireworks master and you detonate fireworks and create your own spectatular while accumulating points.

This project of mine started out as an assignment for university where i had to demonstrate that i was able to build a game mechanic using the game engine unity. I obviously got slightly carried away and ended up creating a game called "Franky's Big Bang" which is a very short game with 5 levels with menu, in game pause system and everything a game should have. It took me 5 - 7 days working day and night to create this game and was fairly pleased with the result. The game was designed to be more to be a visual spectacular by simply blowing up rockets with your mouse and making wonderful explosions with good sound effects.

I've considered taking this game much further and making it commericial, and should i do that, i would probably make it more challenging by adding an audience meter where explosions make them happy and non exploding rockets make them angry to the point where if audience is too angry, you are booed off the game (Similar in the way to what is done in the game Guitar Hero). I would also add much more new environments with special characters and a wide range of different musics.

A role playing game where you play a child who must learn the value of money.

Mini Money Matters was a small side project I worked on for Enactus which is an organisation that looks toward empowering individuals with entrepreneurial skills.

One particular project was that of "Mini Money Matters" which was focused creating a game which will help young kids in primary school develop and learn early skills in entrepreneurship, and learn all about finanicial matters which comply with ASIC standards.

The idea was that by playing in a simple and interactive game, kids would be more willingly learn new skills and gain knowledge which they would have otherwise found too complex.

An Indiana Jones themed pinball game.

When working at Hammerfall doing an internship there, my boss told me about once how he had this idea for an adventure type pinball game that he once invisioned. Although we were mostly kidding around, I thought for fun I would create a simple Indiana Jones game during a weekend just so I could show him in jest while at the same time practising my game development skills.

Project took me the weekend and probably a day more, but was a fun one and had some good practise playing around with physics. Its not a complex game, and is relatively simple, but was a project created mostly just for fun.

A MOBA genred game where 2 opposing sides must take out the enemy capital. It is the classic old tale between good and evil, nature vs technology!

This game of mine started out as a simple end of semester project for the unit introduction to video games. It was built on Kodu, which is a very simple game engine mostly targeted toward young people as its programming style is more visual, and is more about selecting behaviours and instructions from already made kodu objects. I really wanted to have fun with this game, and see how far i could push the game engine into doing complex behaviours rather than just a overly simplistic game.

My aim was to make a dota style game, and given the limited amount of objects i had to work with, i decided to call it "Nature Vs Technology". For nature i had trees which acted as towers which shot out bees at the enemies, and for technology i had turrets which shot out rockets. Of course what is the fun of 2 sides killing eachother when you can make it more fun and add a giant fish that kills anything that crosses its path. Meet big guy, the giant pink fish. Why pink you ask? well ill be honest with you, it is because i ran out of colours to use in the kodu program itself lol. But to be honest i think it gives big guy personality.

I wanted to add some music for the game, and so had different tracks that could be playing with a little band playing music shooting colourful rockets out of their heads and twirling around in circles throwing around flowers lol. Damn, now that i think about it, what was i thinking? lol.

A 2d fighting game based on sci-fi characters and movie characters.

Space Jam was a project which began with a small group of members from the SciFi Group @ Macquarie University participating in a Game Jam where the objective was to make a game within just a few hours in one single day.

We decided to make a fighting game based on different characters from Sci Fi movies, but also characters we just thought were cool haha. Initially everyone contributed by doing simple tasks like image manipulation and editing so that it may be used to construct the fighting models in the game, while the hosts (Instructors) who were the lead and most experienced of us would work on the main programming of the game and animations.

After doing my small bit i decided to contribute much more and took it upon myself to create a character selection screen which took me roughly 1.5 days. Unfortunately the hosts never really took it very far and so the whole project kinda died. However I still kept the character selection user-interface which I created for the game.

A 30 second promotional video showcasing the everyday things we see everyday and making it more interesting.

The aim of this project was to create a 30 second video that would make everyday things to seem more interesting. I had a partner as part of this assignment as we both decided to choose the theme of public transport. I ended up going for a day at the city, and went all over the place capturing as many pictures as possible that i thought were interesting. There was however one moment where i was taking a picture on the ferry where it was abit windy, so the water was abit rough and was warned not to be outside lol. All of a sudden there was a huge crash into a wave and a big splash of water came flying at the front of the boat, but i was not fast enough and i missed the perfect shot!. However the wave didnt end up missing me, and me and my camera ended up getting drenched bigtime lol.

Anyways when i got back to the labs, I went through the images with my partner, and we jointly selected which ones would be the best to use. In the end I ended up putting it together while getting feedback from my partner as I put it together. I had a first choice of music to use, but then in the end decided to change it and used the one in the video now. Hope you enjoy!

A simpsons themed media player for editing videos on the fly so that when it plays a video, you can add all kinds of effects to the video as it is being played.

Name I just came up with on the spot as i was working on a project for university. Using a visual programming software Cycling74's Max/Jitter, everyone was assigned a task to demonstrate that we are able to load up images or videos, and then manipulate it in some way. Its just a little something I began whipping up in the last 2 days, so may seem a little unpolished. However it is just a small project mostly to demonstrate our knowledge with MAX.

Of course once I got started, I just kept taking things further and further. So Right now I have a very basic Disc Jockey System that is able to transition videos from a selection list, and replace the song that is currently playing. Also you are able to manipulate the colours of the video playback to suit the moment.

Like I said, very basic, but I am continuely adding new features and should become an interesting tool that can be used for producing video manipulation on the fly for presentations.

A simple animated Christmas postcard. Click and make a snowflake appear.

The Christmas Postcard was a side project I created for fun as it was almost christmas at the time and we were encouraged to make creations and post them on the iLearn forums. I created this christmas postcard which although was simple, was VERY time consuming.

Everything was drawn from using primitive shapes to more complex shapes using lines from vertex to vertex. That snowflake was the most time consuming part of the whole project as I basically had to go from vertex to vertex, and if you look very closely, there are ALOT of lines. It was almost like performing surgery at a programming level and getting all the lines to come into place correctly haha. It was torture and half way through i regretted that i ever started, but once i had already completed so much, I couldn't see how i could possibly give up and not finish it.

So i stuck through the project til the very end, and what turned out was a nice post card which had a nice snowflake that randomly enters the top of the screen at random locations and slowly fades away by the time it reaches the bottom. I was very happy and proud of my postcard, and still break a smile at that torturing snowflake haha.

A computer algorithm based on "Conway's Game Of Life" and "Langton's Ant"

Game of Life and Langton's Ant was a project done mostly for understanding patterns and demonstrating emergent behaviour through a set of predefined rules.

It is a cellular automaton that through simple rules, demonstrates complex behaviour given a predfined starting position. It was based on "Conway's Game Of Life" and "Langton's Ant".