Group Projects
Garden Guardians
Genre: Hack 'n' Slash
Team Size: 12 Engine: Unreal 4 Info: 3D, 1-4 player local Co-op Garden Guardians is a beautiful hack 'n' slash set in the fairy tale world of the Vegetable Kingdom. It follows four knights who return home to find their lands being ravaged by the barbarous 'Meats,' who want nothing more than to consume or destroy everything that our brave knights hold dear. The journey will have the knights explore wondrous locations, fight savage enemies, and take back the lands that have been stolen from them. The game features 4-player co-op, different vegetable-themed weapons, and unique spells for each knight. My contribution was to the overall design of core systems as well as level and encounter design. We hit the ground running with this project, diving into what systems we wanted to see and the 'how' of our ambitious ideas. This project was my first foray into the Unreal Engine, where I learned how to utilize its blueprint system to script encounters and special events. |
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Aeon
Genre: Action/Adventure, Atmospheric
Team Size: 11 Engine: Unity Info: 3D, 1 player Aeon puts the player control of Orion the Hunter, a great and powerful deity who has been cast from his immortal place in the sky by an unknown force. He is not alone; many of the stars have fallen to the ancient realms of ruin, his fellow deities broken and scattered. Orion, with the help of his old friend, Polaris, must reclaim the power of the stars and confront the one who dared dethrone the constellations. This is a game that has gone through many changes. It was originally envisioned as a fighting game, where players could select a constellation with their own unique move set and have them fight each other. This idea soon turned into a cooperative dungeon-crawl before it was decided that we should focus on a single character's journey back into the skies. Since the game was becoming more of a personal tale, we focused on narrative at first before seeing what we could do with atmosphere and subtle, discover-able parts of the world as a way to convey the story. I contributed a lot of the design work, both in systems and level design. I realized early on that I didn't want to have a story about an anthropomorphic constellation to have nothing to do with the game play aside from combat. That's when I thought that collecting stars and rebuilding yourself would be a much more effective way to convey the feeling of rising after being cast down. Orion starts with little to no power, and it now falls to the player to gather the stars and become a celestial power again. |
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Crash Bang Wallop
Genre: Action/Brawl
Team Size: 4 Engine: Zero Engine (DigiPen Institute of Technology's in-house engine) Info: 2D, 2-4 player local competitive Crash Bang Wallop is an absolutely insane competitive brawler. It was one of the first games I made with a group of other designers. After creating a quick prototype using ActionScript, I managed to beguile three other talented designers to help me take it beyond a prototype and develop it into something grander. And wackier. My contribution was to the design of most of the game, particularly the 'add a few more zeros to that force multiplier' logic. I created the Sci-Fi level, with a lethal plasma globe dividing the arena, and the ridiculously dangerous mega-death-beam-of-death that could be activated by other players. Making traps for the players to catch each other (and often themselves) in was an absolute blast, and it led to the creation of a game that, while easily seen as crude when looking back on it, is one of my favorite experiences that I've created for others to enjoy. |
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