Escape Area 51 (2022)

Made in Unity
Team Size: 5
Timeline: about 3 weeks
Worked On: Game Design, Game Programming

As a Programmer

Since it was a very small team, I was the only dedicated programmer on the team. We had a tech artist who also helped with some of the programming, which was a great help since we only had a couple weeks for this project. It was a lot of fun to work on a team larger than 2 on a game, since this was the first project for my graduate degree. I programmed the character movement and attacks, the enemies, as well as the checkpoint mechanic. There weren't any large issues that I came across in this project, and the team was amazing. It was a lot of fun to see what we all could do in the short time as our first project!

As a Designer

This was the very first project we did for my graduate program. We were prompted to iterate upon an old arcade game. The game we chose was Moon Patrol. This was a smaller group, and we all had a hand in choosing what game we iterated on, as well as the design for our own game. We went through a lot of different ideas before landing upon aliens and Moon Patrol. We originally wanted to do the game Elevator Action, but another team beat us to claim it. Unfortunately, we had already come up with the idea of an alien escaping from an underground facility. They would go up, instead of down, and eventually reach their ship and escape.
When we had to choose a different game, we didn't fully abandon our original design. When we ended up choosing Moon Patrol, we kept much of our original idea, just adapting it to the new game mechanics.