You've been called by the boss of 3 Museos. A bunch of
ghosts have escaped an old artifact.
It is your job to suck them all up, while making sure the
artifacts don't break.
This game was made with a team of 5 for a client.
For this project I took on a wide variety of responsibilities. I was the only programmer, so
was responsible for making tools that the artists and level designer could use, to simple gameplay programming.
This role along with me taking initiative gave me a big role in design as well.
The biggest hurdle we faced was a coherent vision. This was due to a bunch of things like a lack of communication between 2 parts of our team
& the fact that we weren't designing a game for our target audience of 10+.
In the end communication ended up being our biggest strength as I really hammered on that and gave everyone in the team a platform to give their input
whenever we were discussing key mechanics.
We originally had the following flow in mind for the ghosts: they will try and possess items & cause general chaos. You need to use the artifacts around you to knock the ghost out so it falls out of the artifact. Although our client was absolutely in love with this idea his boss didn't like that you needed to break artifacts.
Meaning we had to make it so that you didn't use the artifacts & instead just sucked the ghost up. This made the game very boring though. So to bring the fun back we decided to pivot, the priority was now to save the artifacts. Not suck up the ghost. This brought back tension as you try to save the artifact before it falls to the ground after sucking up a ghost.
Very early on we knew we wanted a certain level design. You would walk around in a big museum & enter possessed rooms. This meant I as the programmer would have to implement a system that makes it easy to add logic to any individual room or the whole game.
I used component based programming as well as inheritance & events to build up the system. If someone wanted to add functionality to a room or the whole game like let's say doors opening. Then they would make a DoorManager script, which would then link itself to either the level or the room.
I did all the programming
Ghost state machine, localisation support, etc...
Level & Mechanics Design
Voice overs
I wrote & edited the trailer
I learned a lot on how to communicate in/with a team & how to design projects with a larger scope and lifetime.
In addition I also had to learn how to plan and scope using tools like google spreadsheets so that the project was
constantly moving forwards and people always had something to work on.
Thanks to my teammates' great contrubtions like the amazing music from our sound artist & cute animations from my friend on the right
we were able to deliver a final result that our client was very happy with.
Unity
C#
Game Design
OOP
MVP
User Experience
HacknPlan
Team Management