Summer 2021
Made with Unity, published to Itch.io
Alongside some talented peers in CMU’s NHSGA program, I made a fully original game in two weeks. Our schedule was designed to mirror aspects of the real industry experience, including an initial ideation period, a pitch in front of advisors, and finally a development period concluded by a final pitch.
Although we had to scrap a really good idea for a pirate ship battling game, we settled on a fun little open-world-ish game about gathering ingredients in a fantasy world to make tea.
A little trailer made for our game by one of our wonderful developers! Our lead artist snuck in some scrapped art from the pirate idea on the left wall.
Although my role was primarily programming, I dabbled slightly in the art and music sides during the initial planning periods. Later on, I settled into my programming role as the lead gameplay programmer and art integrator (SFX and VFX).
Because we were amateurs to the art pipeline, integration actually took up a not-insignificant amount of time. That often included working with the artists to fix or rework certain animations or visual effects. I found it valuable to learn how to convey the artistic strengths and limitations of the Unity to the artists so that they could get the most out of their designs.
Although two weeks seemed like a lot of time, it ended up being quite a crunch to not only finish up the game, but present a finalized pitch to our advisors to show off the work we’d done behind the scenes.
