Game Designer
MOBILE APPS
Beginning in my sophomore year of high school, my brother, Jonathan, and I decided to get our feet wet in mobile development. He was in college majoring in computer science. Throughout all of these projects, my brother was the programmer while I was the artist. We both shared the role of designer.
BEAR MASTER
Our first app was a game called Bear Master. The aim for this game was to make something like Flappy Bird, where the player needed to dodge objects. The player controls a bear climbing a tree and you need to dodge bees. I created all of the art assets that you see in this game.
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This project required me to work a lot in a graphics editor. I became comfortable working in Gimp and continued to use it for future projects.
This was a good starting point in our development and showed us things we needed to work on. This showed us both what the development process is like and how to overcome problems/disagreements during development. One major thing that we needed to change was our game development platform. Bear Master was made in GameSalad, which proved to be a little worse than we intended. After this project, we created our games with Cocos 2d-x.
BRAINSTATE
This next project was a very interesting one to create. In my junior year of high school, it was a requirement that I complete a project called Exhibition. This involved me making a presentation in front of a panel of judges about a solution to a problem in the world. I decided to do my project on stress and anxiety in schools.
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Being someone who's interested in New Age things, I knew about something called Brainwave Entrainment. This is a way of attempting to change your brain waves by listening to different frequencies. These frequencies resemble naturally occurring frequencies that exist within our brains. I used this technology in my Exhibition project as a solution to the anxiety problem. We created an app for my project and named it Brainstate.
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This was a new project for us because we were used to creating games. We had to change the way we designed this app and create it for a different audience than we did before. This time around, we also had a strict deadline. If I didn't have this ready for my project, I would fail. I was in charge of creating the frequencies and integrating them into the app, along with the overall design.
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Integrating the frequencies into the app was by far the hardest challenge. Other app developers had similar apps on the store, but they created their frequencies in a different way. I'm unsure how they created them, but they didn't sound good. I used a program that created very high quality frequencies, but the problem was seamlessly looping them in the app. After countless hours trying to solve this problem, we couldn't resolve it in time for the deadline. This remains to be the biggest issue with the app, but overall it's a very beautiful and well-designed application.
POLITIC PUNCH
Our next game was creating during and inspired by the 2016 Presidential Election. We knew that everyone would be on their phones and on social media. Marketing would be easy if we could get our game talked about amid all of the political talk. This would also be a perfect time for an election-themed game to go viral.
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When creating the idea, we wanted something that everyone could relate to. We didn't want this game to favor one candidate over the other, because then we would lose out on a large part of the potential audience. We brainstormed ideas that people might think were funny but also not violent. There were apps on the store designed for the user to take their anger out on a candidate and we thought they were unacceptable. The presidential debates were almost like the candidates were pitted against each other in a ring. This is where we got our idea of having them fight each other in the game.
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We designed this game like Rock'em Sock'em Robots. The player taps the screen to make their character punch. We created a single player mode, two player mode, and multiplayer mode. Designing the difficulty of the opponent in single player mode was difficult. The opponent was always too hard or too easy. My brother also worked very hard creating the multiplayer mode. We never quite had enough people playing the game where you could find a match with someone.
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During this project, I wanted to improve my programming skills and I learned what I could from my brother as he created the game. Along with this, I was in charge of all of the art assets. I designed the tiny details in the White House in the background of the game. I created every character that can be played in the game and payed attention to every detail about them. We picked a majority of the candidates that ran for president so that people could emotionally connect with the candidate that they liked. We created different skins for each candidate according to the jokes and satire that was flying around. Sadly, Apple has a rule about depictions of real people fighting each other, so they banned our app and we had to scrap all of the skins. On iOS, the player can either choose a donkey or elephant, but on Android, they have access to all of the original skins.
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I'm very proud of this project and this is our most complex app to date.
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Find it on the Google Play Store here.