I Went to Space and Somebody Stole my Baby!

This game is a Team Project, with five developers. One was responsible for Art, another took care of Level Design, the third was in charge of testing and QA, and the fourth was the producer, keeping everyone working. I was the primary programmer of the team, I coded most of the gameplay feature on each level and some in between the levels. 

What is this Project:
The initial idea of the game was to combine the world of The Mandalorian with the gameplay style of Super Mario Bros, making it a fast-paced side scrolling 2D platform shooter that encourages exploration. With our game, I Went to Space and Somebody Stole my Baby, the player plays as a Mandalorian that fights through various enemies in search of their stolen child across multiple planets. The idea was to have each level as a planet played in the side scroller view and the space flight as a top-down perspective game mode. The space flight game mode was scrapped for the betterment of the planet levels. The planet levels are all unique, on the visual side they have their own landscapes, enemies and hazards, the scripting of enemies and hazards in the levels is used throughout all levels. The top-down feature was still included in the final game, instead of a whole game mode it served as the level select part of the game.
The mechanics of the game include the standard 2D platformer set of moves, there is running, jumping, and of course shooting. We didn’t include a double jump feature to increase the difficulty and encourage the player to use other movement features available to them. Such features include the ladders and bounce pads, the bounce pads where later removed as they would give the player a big advantage.
As for the story side of the game, the idea was to have comedy drive the narrative forward and to use it to pay homage to the inspirations of the game. The elements of comedy and art added to the game were to try have it stand out from the rest of the games in the genre. The key focus is combining space, exploration and comedic storytelling to form the bases of this game.

My Contribution to the Project:
As the Lead Programmer of the project, I contributed a whole bunch of technical features, not all of them my idea but some of them were. I developed part of the platformer movement system, modifying the characteristics of the character to the way we wanted them to be. I built upon the unity standard assets player character, adding a health system and a weapon system. The health system consists of a health bar and a life count, the player losses a life whenever the health bar reaches zero. The weapon system is a point and shoot system, the player points with their cursor and whatever they want and shoot, the weapon is on a pivot and has a full 360 degrees of rotation. I also developed most of the prefabs or objects found in the game. I would take the art from the Art lead and implement it however it was required. I created the building blocks of the levels, this includes ground objects, platforms and ladders for the player to use. I coded the health pickups and hazards found in each level of the game, each with their own level appropriate sprite style. I also coded the enemy systems of the game, these are their movement ability, shooting function and their ways of damaging the player.