Games
Beasts of Maravilla Island
Team of 25+
Gameplay Engineer
Summer 2020
1 Year
This is a game where you play as Marina, a young girl who travels to a mystical island to photograph the many creatures and plants that live there. To do so there will be many environmental puzzles to solve in order to get those perfect photo taking opportunities with the animals.
This project is a current Advanced Game Project (AGP) at USC. The game was prototyped by our director in May of 2019 (A process that I helped with). That summer we officially started pre-production on the project., aiming to finish the game by May 2020.
I've done many things on the project including:
-Character Controller
-Edge Detection System
-Animations for the player and the animals
-3rd Person Camera Controls
-General Input Programming
-Puzzle Logic
For the character controller, I had to program movement as well as specific methods of traversing around the world. This includes climbing ledges and trees, as well as jumping onto lily pads. The hardest challenge was creating an edge detection to prevent the player from falling off branches. As the level was constantly being iterated on, this was necessary so that designers didn't have to spend time putting up invisible colliders every time they moved something.
It's been a very rewarding project to work on. I've been able to work on a team of over 25 wonderful people. I've learned a lot through working on the project, including how to develop for the Nintendo Switch and better coding practices.
Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, we were unable to finish the entire game by May 2020. We've decided to continue working on the game during the summer to get the completely finished game out by the end of summer.
By the next year, we finally released the game on Steam and Switch.