Prototypes

General concept

The following are a series of projects that were developed in distinct circumstances, but for one reason or another, never saw green light to enter the development cycle. Nonetheless, I thought it would be insightful to add, so here we go:

A.C.T.I.O.N.

A.C.T.I.O.N., otherwise known as A Cautionary Torment Imposed On the Nameless, is a semi-linear action game of a young boy who is exiled into the accursed wilderness of an island, and needs to escape in order to survive. The game is broken down into a sequence of several levels, at the end of which is the key to the final boss room; once obtained, the player has to undo their path, all the way back to the start of the game. During the return, however, the challenges they face are different, because practically in every room, they are chased by an undefeatable enemy, and the resources they have, to divert its attention, or stop its movement, are highly limited. This generates a dynamic similar to roguelikes, where there is repetition aided by the knowledge of how to optimize already-encountered obstacles.

There were also distinct minor enemies that interacted with the roaming area boss that chases the player, and a system of health - stamina management, but ultimately, the project didn't take off because it was done in a custom engine. This meant that, although we made a fully playable release in less than a month, the workload to create our own tools and the polish necessary to make it into a commercial release was too much a workload for the available budget.

On the other hand, using a custom engine also meant this was the project we had to use most external tools for, as well as the one requiring the most involvement with the creation of assets, only borrowing from others the two music tracks. A list of said tools is as follows:

• GLEW
• OpenGL
• PhysFS
• SDL2
• SDL2_Image
• SDL2_Mixer
• Tiled
• Freetype

The rest, then, including but not limited to the render pipeline, the collision system, the enemy behavior, the sprites, the sound effects, and of course, the level design, mechanic design, progression design, balancing... All had to be accounted for in the span of a single month, under my responsibility. There was also a playtesting session done at the end of the release, which I conducted with a group of five participants.

Gdala series

The Gdala series was a three-part project that spanned a total of about two months, carried out in Unreal Engine 5. It was comprised of a fully-realized demo, and two short prototypes, each aiming for unique targets. The demo was a story-based point-and-click with a branching narrative and diegetically integrated UI, comparable in concept to Please, Don't Touch Anything, though with a strong focus on sensitive content.

The third project was a rework of the demo, with a change of visual style, and swapping the UI-based interactions for a more typical Visual Novel kind of approach, but ultimately it didn't go past the prototype barrier, due to lack of artistic resources.

Gdala: No Man's Shell, the second of the projects, was a complete innovation of the series, keeping the same world and characters, but fundamentally altering the gameplay. Instead of interacting with static UI elements, the player would alternate story and play-time, in which they would have to repel certain telegraphed attacks, as their enemies morph and amalgamate into more powerful beings.

Though the visual aspect was highly emphasized, taking a more abstract and minimalist style to accomodate for our skills, the game failed to harness any significant attention, and was discontinued to cut costs.