Galactic Squirrel Studios
Project Lead
(Galactic Squirrel Studios, 2024)
My role as the project lead was to handle all planning, tracking, and production to bring the game to life (Galactic Squirrel Studios, 2024). I tracked all the progress made on the project based on completion (Galactic Squirrel Studios, 2024). I created Kanban workflows using Trello for tracking tasks and bugs (Galactic Squirrel Studios, 2024).
When I started to plan out the project, I had studied Kanban to find the most efficient and easy way to plan out all of the tasks (Atlassian, n.d.). As the project progressed, pipelines were updated to help with efficient project status tracking (Galactic Squirrel Studios, 2024). Discussing with the professor also helped create a programming review workflow and bug tracking workflow (R. Papp, personal communication, 2024).
Combat Design
(Galactic Squirrel Studios, 2024)
As a combat designer, I had to design the unique combat system for The Enemy Is Humanity, using two different firing modes with a unique damage system (Galactic Squirrel Studios, 2024). My role consisted of planning out and research the design of the combat in documentation within google docs (Galactic Squirrel Studio. 2024). I would then fully implement the designs and balance them within Unreal Engine 5.4 (Galactic Squirrel Studios, 2024).
When looking into combat design, my focus was on looking into the risk reward system (Lambottin, 2012). With every connection made within a large group of enemies, there is a risk of shooting an enemy blocked by most of the other enemies (Lambottin, 2012). The goal was to find a way for the player to have that risk, but also the speedy movement to allow for the risk to not penalize the player too much (Lambottin, 2012). Implementing sprint and dash allow the player to get around large groups of enemies to split them up, making the reward of killing them more attainable (Galactic Squirrel Studios, 2024; Lambottin, 2012).
Enemy Design
(Galactic Squirrel Studios, 2024)
During my enemy design role, I researched and designed the base combat, behavior, art and balance of the enemies (Galactic Squirrel Studios, 2024). The process would start with finding out what the main boss mechanics will be, to find out what enemies will need to teach the player leading up to the boss (Galactic Squirrel Studios, 2024). I would then finalize the documentation and assign the task to a technical designer to implement (Galactic Squirrel Studios, 2024).
When designing the enemies, the goal was to use enemies to train the player for the next enemies, similar to the Pokemon sword gym battles (Game Freak, 2019). I designed two standard enemy types (melee and ranged), three mini bosses (melee, sniper, and rocket launcher), and a main boss (multistage) that will challenge the player (Stout, 2010). The main boss has a story and feedback to help the battle feel epic and killing the boss feel amazing to the player (Galactic Squirrel Studios, 2024; Stout, 2010).