About Me

I’m Dale Lemieux, a professional Unity engineer that has been making games for over 10 years. I love prototyping new ideas and being the glue that connects other people's content together into fantastic games. Empathy and compassion are core values to me. When away from my computer, you can find me grabbing a coffee, playing with my dog Evie at the park, or settling in for an evening of sitcoms.

Click these buttons or scroll down for examples of my previous work.

SHIPPED GAMES AND PROJECTS

PROTOTYPES and EXPERIMENTS

Shipped Games and Projects

THE SPIRIT LIFT

A retro horror deckbuilding rogue-like in a haunted hotel. Sole developer of all UX and features as well as supporting a seven-person team of design, art, and audio creators. Co-designer of card game systems and interaction design. Created editor tools for building floor maps, card effects, audio events, and YarnSpinner scripts. Currently in development. Listed on Steam.

The Lamplighters League

A strategy game mixing real-time infiltration, turn-based tactical combat, and a character-driven story. Worked as a senior gameplay engineer from early production up to release. Engineered and contributed to core combat systems, user interfaces, tutorial system, save/load, animation sequencing, ability system, and more. Shipped to Steam and Xbox game pass.

Code Romantic

A narrative heavy educational sci-fi game about programming. Created in Unity and shipped to Itch.io and Steam. I was the sole-developer along with a designer and artist. Received 97% positive reviews on Steam. I developed the virtual coding UI and puzzle system, as well as several tools and pipeline features for the designer to use when scripting scenes, puzzles, and dialogue. Also built a telemetry layer to track puzzle difficulty, player progression, and collect user feedback.

Fantom Feast

A casual 2D action game where the player eats smaller ghosts to grow as large as possible. I was the sole dev and lead developer. Contained power ups, multiple enemy types and hazards, save system, and controller support. Created in Unity. Published to Itch.io and Steam.

Top Dog: Lucky’s Charm

An all-ages adventure game about dogs with character dialogue and inventory-based puzzles. This was my second game created for Android, and I implemented the engine myself using Java. 11,000+ downloads, 4.5 average rating out of 341 ratings. (5 months dev time.)

Top Dog: Showtime

A cooperative 3D board game with local multiplayer, dynamic quip system, random board space events, and multiple endings. I was the sole developer, and used a voxel editing program to create all the dog characters and environment assets myself.

Shark Bait

A puzzle game I developed for Android using pure Java. The player must guide a shark around the map to collect all the fish in order to win, but can only do so by rearranging the tiles to provide a track for the shark to travel along. The levels are randomly generated and slowly increase in difficulty.

Zelda Game Guides

I created a mobile checklist app for the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, reaching 500,000+ downloads. These helped guide the player to all collectibles in the game, and I received many emails from fans about how they were finally able to complete game files.

Mythari Park MUD

A procedurally-generated roller coaster ride created for a month-long MUD game jam. Won multiple awards for best overall, codebase, story, and creativity. Allowed players to connect simultaneously to the same instance and interact with each other while exploring the theme park. The code is available for review on GitHub. (The game jam was 1 month long.)

Online Yugioh Website

A real-time online multiplayer card game supporting two or three player games, with customizable decks based on YuGiOh. The website utilized a MySQL database to coordinate moves. To drastically reduce the dev time, I focused on implementing the interactions as opposed to the exact ruleset so players could self govern their cards and lifepoints, which worked quite well!

Nanaimo Loader

This is a Unity Asset Store package I created to help non-coders create their own custom loading screens in their games.

Lost Footage

A horror game with a constantly changing environment and monster mystery. This was made in Unity, and I was the sole developer along with a designer and animator. The forest would shuffle its layout every day, hiding mysteries in various spots. The player would explore and use a cell phone to record in-game videos of creepy events and receive points for turning in that footage.

This screenshot shows the feedback tool I created, which allowed players to log messages while playing, and in the Unity editor a designer can view where they were standing/facing, and view the message. This was useful for debugging colliders in the forest, and other location based bugs.

Path Tracking Tool

A tool to log player movement through a space, and then allow level designers to review session data later. This was useful to see where in the forest players were walking, which pathways they were drawn to/ignoring, and how close they came to discovering or missing certain features of the forest.

Prototypes and Experiments

Procedural room layouts

A prototype for creating floor plans using room sockets and a randomized layout inside, choosing between a work desk, presentation room, or meeting space. (1 day)

Robot Brain Assembler

This was a prototype for a functioning survival game where the player could craft chip components and assemble their own robot brain on a 4x4 grid using drag and drop. The selected pieces would then actually modify the robot’s stats and capabilities, such as jump height, number of ability bar slots, run speed, etc. The end of the demo required them to reach the top of a cliff using the boosts. (3 weeks.)

Lawn Mowing Sim

A prototype playing around with a lawn mowing mechanic and grass that grows over time. The goal was to use particle systems and audio to make a simple mechanic feel satisfying. (1 day)