Rapid Prototyping

From August 2023 til early December 2023, I designed and produced four different prototypes during short, 2-3 week development cycles.

This was done as part of my first semester of Graduate School with the University of Utah’s Division of Games, and was hugely educational for me.

The approach during these projects was to develop a prototype, and a prototype only, albeit with an increased amount of art assets and visual development compared to the industry standard for a prototype. As such, many of these are buggy and messy, and only have a playtime of 1-5 minutes. However, they are, on their own, snippets of my work and talents as a designer and interesting little experiments, built while learning how to more effectively work under immense pressure.

Though I had 5 published projects by this point (2 on Steam, and 3 on itch.io), the opportunity to work in a simulated studio environment among passionate peers in the program was enlightening, educational, and effective. I can proudly say I am a more effective game developer after these projects.

Three of those four projects are featured below.

Project Lure

Asteroid Panic is a prototype developed with a team of 4 people using Unity 2D over a 2 week development cycled.

The prompt for this project was to develop an iteration on an early arcade game (pre-1985) and doing so using only one button and joystick controls. We chose the game “Avalanche”, and I iterated on the design of the original game by implementing a dual-objective system wherein, instead of just catching falling projectiles for points, the player must switch back and forth between a “catch” mode and a “deflect” mode, catching falling asteroids and deflecting projectiles from passing UFOs.

This game was also my first time developing for HTML5, and it is completely playable in browser (Check it out below!).

More of a Pure Prototype than a game demo, this game was developed over the course of 3 weeks with some very peculiar and specific constraints. My team of ~ 5 people was tasked with drawing a verb out of a hat (ours being “lure”), then developing a number of unique mechanics equal to the number of people on our team, with each team member working on only one mechanic entirely on their own using Unreal’s Blueprint system. We then had to implement those mechanics into a gymnasium for testing and to be used as a “living design document”

Though I have a lot of experience with both traditional scripting and visual scripting with blueprints, I challenged myself to learn UE5’s Blackboard and Behavior Tree systems and implement an adaptive monster-chase and stealth system.

Ultimately, the project wasn’t required to be packaged as an executable, so there is no easily accessible demonstration, but the project was a welcome reminder of the importance of in-engine implementation and readily accessible engine-tools and test environments.

Alongside working on my mechanic, I also helped with production tasks and led general design and ideation for my team.