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Mana Punch
(August - November 2020)
Lead Programmer, Sound Designer
Mana Punch is a single-player brawler where players take control of Eva Arianrhod, a sorceress who was imprisoned for "unnecessary use of magic" and is forced to fight monsters in a gladiatorial arena. Players equip various spells to Eva's fists, feet, arms, and legs whose effects are invoked whenever she punches or kicks an enemy.
Mana Punch was my team's capstone game, and as a result of having only six people on the team, we all took on multiple roles. I was the team's lead programmer, and I was responsible for creating the spell architecture, the save system, the enemy AI, most of the animations seen in the game, and the sound system, along with various other minor tasks. As the lead programmer, I met with Dante Xystus, our UI/UX programmer, regularly to ensure that we divided each sprint's programming tasks equitably, and I talked with our designers, Matt Randolph and Zack Neiheiser, about planned spell effects to keep the system in-scope for the limited time we had.
Taking on multiple roles (gameplay, AI, sound, and animation) was a fun experience because I learned a lot of new techniques that made my work more efficient. For example, I learned about NavMeshes, which saved a lot of time that would have been spent writing complex pathing algorithms, and discovered Unity's Animation Rigging preview package, which let me store only a few data points per keyframe and allowed me to quickly create punch and kick animations for both the player and enemies of similar stature.
The rest of Team Inverted X is as follows:
Adam Dionne (Lead Artist)
Dante Xystus (UI/UX Programmer and VFX Artist)
Matt Randolph (Level Designer)
Wolfgang Westdorp (Producer)
Zack Neiheiser (Narrative Designer and Product Owner)
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