Bardic Defender (Academic Project):

Bardic Defender is a hybrid of a rhythm game and a shooter game. This game was developed in a group of 5 in Spring 2020 with the GameMaker engine for a class. In Bardic Defender, the player has to keep careful track of the oncoming enemies, while pressing arrow keys that are displayed on the bottom to shoot to shoot a musical note at an enemy. The player has to properly move themselves in the right path of the enemies while simultaneously using the arrow keys in a rhythmic manner.

My role in this project was to design the various difficulty levels and modes. There are two modes in the game, a regular mode and an endless mode. The regular mode has two difficulties. I wanted to make sure that both levels were balanced in difficulty. I did this by designing the difficulty and balance with the two levels in the regular mode by making them simple, but obviously different in difficulty. As for the endless mode, I prioritized limited scaling to make sure the game did not get boring and monotonous, or progressively impossible. This project was my first experience with balancing a game mode. I had to make sure that the increase in difficulty made the game more interesting and clear, while preventing it from being impossible to achieve a certain high score.

This project was a huge learning experience for me, for several reasons. It was the first time I had to create a game from initial concept to final product in a team, and I had to learn about how to work with a team and prioritize roles. I quickly adapted to being a game designer, and had to work with another game designer on my team to make sure the modes in the game meet the expectations we wanted to provide. This project was also the first time I ever worked with the GameMaker engine, meaning I had to teach myself aspects of it. Despite this obstacle, I worked with my team on simple features of the engine I could use, such as UI development.

However, this project was started as soon as the COVID-19 reached its initial peak, forcing everyone to work from home. Since this was an unprecedented situation for all of us, we wanted to just do our best given the situation and fins ways to work from home. This was difficult, as none of us were prepared or had any experience working from home before. We all decided as a team it was best to prioritize our health and take this project slow; we knew we had other classes to commit to and the world was ever-changing by the day. While this was not a full-time remote job, it did expose me to working remotely in a smaller setting that did not require a full-time job’s work of commitment which allowed me to transition this experience into future remote jobs.