Marcus
Santos
Project Summary
YOUniverse is a 2D roguelike fighter game created by our game development team, "Dingo Devs". You play as "Max", a college student, determined to find reclaim his cat, "Meowbert". Max must fight his way through different dimensions and defeat other versions of himself to save his best buddy.
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As the Lead Programmer and Gameplay Designer of the development team, I was in charge of writing and implementing the of the game's code as well as designing the levels, properties, and gameplay aspects of the game. The game was completed in Unity and written in C#.
Original Game Pitch
Ideation
To get an feel for how we wanted the project to turn out, we took inspiration from games with similar gameplay, aesthetic, and dynamics. Game such as "The Binding of Isaac" and "Enter the Gungeon" played a part in how we wanted the game to be like. And games such as "Stardew Valley" and various other 2D pixel art games inspired how we wanted the game to look.
Alpha
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In Alpha, starting from scratch, I individually designed and implemented the the player controller and enemy state machine using squares, creating a template for each character. Once the assets arrived, we were able to easily implement the sprites,
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Independently created the controls, mechanics, and interactions of the players with hostile NPCs using the Unity 2D physics system. Implemented the player’s movement (walk, dash, dodge), basic combat, combinations.
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Additionally, I designed the ability to shift from room to room around the map/level. This required utilization of 2D vectors and physics to track player location/destination. Another example of usage of the physics engine: dashing, knockback, and thrown projectiles all require applied forces directional vector math was also heavily used.
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Created and designed the framework for the enemies. Every enemy type had their own specific form of combat which forced the player to change their approach when fighting them.​​
Melee Enemy
Ranged Enemy
Tank Enemy
Beta
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In the Beta, I was able to create a room generation script that would be able to implement future levels easily with additional art assets/prefabs via procedural generation. It randomly generated a 5 x 5 grid of rooms that randomly placed the player’s spawn room, the boss room, the key room, and a series of enemy formations.
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Random room grid generation in combination with random enemy formations create thousands of combinations for the player to experience.
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Independently designed and programmed both boss fights. With the goal of challenging the player, I designed each boss fight to be rather difficult. However, I made the moves predictable and easy to learn, giving players the ability to be rewarded for learning and analyzing attack patterns
AI Max
Maximillion
Meowbert
AI Max Boss Fight
Meowbert Boss Fight
Looking Back on our Pitch
After completing the project, the group looked back on the goals from the pitch and did a short analysis on what we achieved, what we fell short on, and what we adjusted.
