Chaos King

Roles: Lead Programmer, Producer
Genre: Multiplayer arcade action
Platform: PC
Development Time: 5 months (Spring 2020 semester)
Team Size: 11
Engine: Unity

Chaos King is my capstone project for the Game Design and Development minor at Michigan State University. Our team had the pleasure of working with an MSU alum at Ubisoft, who provided guidance and mentorship throughout the semester.

I was elected by my teammates to take on the roles of Lead Programmer and Producer, and I learned a lot about leadership and project management as a result. On the programming side of things, I am responsible for developing most of the gameplay interactions.

Contributions

Designed, iterated on, and refined the core gameplay systems of the game to deliver a fun and polished experience, namely player movement/abilities and player/item interactions
Leveraged the the power of polymorphism and composition to quickly and efficiently add new mechanics; for example, going from picking up and throwing items to being able to pick up and throw other players
Implemented a post-game scoreboard and player stats system to add further polish to the game

A 1v1 game in-progress

The end game stats and scoreboard scene

Leveraged project management tools to maintain team organization and communication throughout the project. As a result, our team succeeded in implementing all high priority and medium priority features, and some low priority features
Organized a project roadmap to ensure necessary progress for each deadline

Takeaways

Clean, concise, and readable code allows for fast/efficient iteration, which is key for "finding the fun" of a mechanic
It's important to be proactive about communicating across all disciplines of your team in order to meet deadlines
Understanding your teammates' strengths is crucial to be able to function efficiently as a team