2D

Humble Beginnings

In October of 2021, I decided I was going to make an iPhone game. I don’t know why I chose to do this, but BOY AM I GLAD I DID! Monkey Game: Go Bananas! is an arcade game where the player swings from trees to catch a bird before time runs out. A large portion of the game is horribly brute forced, the art leaves much to be desired, and I was unaware of many basic features of Unity while developing.

But, Monkey Game is the project that made me fall in love with game development, and it will always hold a special place in my heart

Success!

Upon release, I went HARD into marketing on Monkey Game, Making posters and putting them up around my school (unfortunately, these are lost to time). I had also been posting dev updates on my snapchat story throughout development, which had slowly spread word around.

On release day I made one more snapchat post about the game, begging people to repost, and they actually did! The story went semi-viral in southwestern Michigan and Monkey Game currently has over 2 thousand downloads!

One Month

For some reason I gave myself the timer of a month to both learn Unity from scratch and complete an entire game. In the end, publishing made the entire process take about a week longer, but development time was just over exactly a month from Oct. 1st to Nov. 2nd

Starting to get it

With about a year of on and off experience under my belt at this point, I think this was the project where I really started to stretch my legs.

Escape Plan B is a high score arcade game where the player moves by the kickback from their arsenal of different guns. Similar to a twin stick shooter but using only one stick.

Featuring an online global leaderboard, an upgrade and shop system, and what I still stand behind as VERY impressive enemy AI for my skills at the time. Escape Plan B is one of my favorite projects from my earlier days.

Success!… right guys?

While to say I didn’t put effort into Escape Plan B’s marketing would be untrue, I definitely could have done more and that showed in the downloads.

While both visually and programmatically a great leap forward from Monkey Game, I learned a valuable lesson that players don’t search till the end of the earth until they discover your game. You need to put it in front of them, point, snap your fingers, wave a bell, and pray to God that they care enough to glance over.

One Month

It’s a nice coincidence for tracking my progress that in fact most of my projects, including this one, take about a month to complete (give or take a week). This will serve as a useful measuring tool for what I can accomplish within a set timeframe within this portfolio

Art Is Probably Important

The art in Monkey Game was severely lacking, with the main offender being the inconsistency in design style and pixel sizes, this is something that I took into consideration from day one with Escape Plan B, focusing hard on art instead of shoving it into the corner seriously took this game to the next level.