This is a collection of games and prototypes I made at different Game Jam events throughout the years. The collection started in January 2019.
Holy Fart
| Global Game Jam 2020
Primary Roles:
Gameplay Programmer
Game Designer
Collaborated with:
Simon He — 3D Artist
Sally Im — 2D & 3D Artist
Shiva Kannan — Sound Designer, Audio Programmer
Pavan Paravasthu — Gameplay Programmer, Game Designer
Holy Fart is a 2-player isometric game where two angels compete against each other to eat stars and fart rain clouds in the sky. The rain clouds will make vegetations grow on the ground and therefore repair the barren earth. The angel who makes the earth grow the most when the time runs out wins!
This game was inspired by “Repair”, the prompt of Global Game Jam 2020, and was made within 48 hours.
Platform: Unity with Xbox Controllers
Download Coming Soon…
Making of Holy Fart
Brainstorming
The initial idea of Holy Fart came together during our late-night brainstorming session where every member on the team was just throwing out random words and phrases. When one of us dropped the word “angel”, we immediately made a connection between these holy beings to the image of “repairing nature”, which was what we saw at the beginning of the theme announcement video. As we were seeking for the verb (i.e. what do the angels do to repair), some one on the team dropped the random word “fart”, which led us to the decision of making a game about farting angels that repair nature.
Iterations: From a Toy to a Game
After committing ourselves to the idea of “fart angels repairing nature”, we focused on implementing the core features–moving, farting, growing vegetations, eating starts (the mechanic to refill the “fart-meter”)–in our first iteration. We ended up having a solid mechanic where players keep eating stars to fart so that their plants and vegetations will flourish. That was also when we were hit by a bigger problem: what’s the goal of the game?
One direction we thought of going in order to create a goal was to have players compete against the system. We thought of a single-player experience where players just have to keep eating stars and farting rain clouds to keep the vegetation alive for a certain amount of time. While the game starts easy, as time goes by it’ll become more challenging as the vegetation starts dying faster. This idea was soon negated for a few reasons:
1. The system would take too much time to balance given the 48-hour development time.2. The dying vegetation kills the sense of progress and accomplishment. (We realized this through a few playtests with other developers)
3. The game does involve enough skills since the generation of stars is completely random.
Alternatively, we went for the idea of making it into a multiplayer experience where two players compete against each other. While they are trying to grow more vegetations of their own kind than their opponent, collectively they will still repair the dying earth. By introducing the multiplayer competition, we were able to make a game out of the toy we built. Although the multiplayer approach solves two of the three problems stated above, the game is still based too much on luck since whether a player can eat a star almost 90% depends on how close that star is randomly generated to them.
Glyph
| 2019 Pittsburgh Board Game Jam
Primary Roles:
Game Designer
Collaborated with:
Kathryn-Mae Eiland
Marieke Van Der Maelen
Andrew McLamb
Namrakant Tamrakar
Glyph is a 4-player board game inspired by Ogham alphabet–an early Medieval alphabet. Each play take turn to place down color marbles in order to get a highest score possible. The way marbles of each color count towards scores is different for and kept secret by each player.
This game was inspired by “Foreign”, the prompt of 2019 Pittsburgh Board Game Jam, and was made within 12 hours.
Restoration
| Global Game Jam 2019
Primary Roles:
Gameplay Programmer
Level Designer
Collaborated with:
Andrew Liu — 2D Artist, Writer
Zane Fadul — Sound Track Artist, Sound Designer, Writer
Restoration follows the elderly Martin the Fox. He has received an eviction notice in the mail, so he attempts to get to the top of a multi-purpose office building and speak with the CEO. He is a very sentimental father, as he keeps all of his sacred memories in his scrapbook. The power of reliving his memories will soon come into play as he sneaks past security and knocks out baddies. An old man getting violent? Not exactly. A dungeon crawler, with all original assets.
This game was inspired by “What Home Means to You”, the prompt of Global Game Jam 2019, and was made within 48 hours.
Platform: Unity
