Bobbi Bones
Bobbi Bones is an isometric Metroidvania action game developed as a vertical slice for our 3rd-year major project.
The game follows Bobbi Bones, a skull who is a con artist, after they are thrown into a prison city. While inside they decide they are going to try to become the world's best villain and attempt to do this by defeating all the other villains. However, in doing so, Bobbi Bones starts being called a hero. Frustrated about the moral labels they have been given Bobbi Bones begins to have a crisis about what it means to be good or bad.
Mechanically the game revolves around the idea that you can bite limbs off the enemies in the level and attach them to your own body to gain new abilities.
The game was developed over 12 weeks as part of our degree and was developed strictly as a vertical slice of one of the areas; the magma-infused lair of the Duke of Toads, Beezle Bufo.
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The Valley of Grief is a research project from 2023. During this project I learnt how to use the Unreal Engine 5 engine, as well as learning ways of depicting the different phases of grief.
My aim with this project was to discover ways to depict grief in a visual setting and then to create them within an environment. I had an aspiration of displaying the five most commonly accepted phases of grief, so that the player would be able to go in between them to try to be as open to as many experiences as possible. In reality this was an unreasonable scope, so I limited it to three recognised grief phases, depicting them in ways that are commonly experienced.
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The Wright Cat's Tale is my 2nd year project. I worked with two others to create it. I focused mainly on the level design of this game as that is the part I was really interested in. After some time I realised I needed to have some sort of difficulty wave. My intention was that it would have some easier parts and some parts harder. This ranged from having to fight more enemies but also combining parkour types.
The finished product doesn't exactly do this very well in its not-so-polished state. But it was really useful to learn about these types of ideas and systems used when designing a level.
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This game was made in a 48-hour Game Jam run by the Massey Wellington Gaming Club, which our Secretary 'Jacob Jopson' did a great job at running and organising.
The keyword we had to make this game was Vision. We went with the literal sense of 'not being able to see' and used our enemies to reflect this while we, as a witch, collected the 6 necessary ingredients to create our master potion.
During the Game Jam, I did a lot of the building of the game with the help of Chat GPT and our game tutor. Meanwhile, my two other team members were busy creating the AI enemies, gathering assets and making our fancy death/win scenes.
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Maze Escape is my first game project, made in my first year at Massey University. The game's criteria was a top-down, 2D shooter. I had been interested in designing a maze for a while, so I created this maze by making several modules and then adding them together in random directions. Once they were combined, I went through and removed walls to give me three different pathways.
One thing I didn't learn to do well was balancing the levels as each level is quite big and has one main pathway. I have a few long dead ends and with how strong in comparison the enemies are to the player it makes it a challenging experience. Still, I'm happy with this as a project and it was a fun challenge.