Senior Reel
Development:
Fall 2020 - Summer 2021
My Role:
Game Design (2020)
Design Lead (2021)
What is Junkpunk?
Junkpunk Arena is a multiplayer action game where players can modularly build their robots, equipping them with weapons, extenders, and shields, in order to send them into the arena to fight other players.
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Junkpunk is set within the dystopian wasteland of New Braska (formerly Nebraska), and follows the story of Dreg, Scoops, and Ace, three scavenger mechanics who make their living by competing in robot fighting tournaments.
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Our team is made up entirely of Champlain College students, who worked on this game over the course of a full school year for their senior capstone project.
Junkpunk Greenlight Presentation (Nov. 2020)
My Contributions
Spring 2021
Since our team increased in size by 2.4 times its previous size, each team member working on Junkpunk Arena was able to focus on one task much more intensely during the course of this semester. It was also during this transition that I became one of the Design Leads for the team. My responsibilities in this department included check-ins with other designers, attending special meetings between team leads, and having a heavy influence in making decisions based on my judgment of the long-term cascading effects each choice would have on our gameplay.
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In order to push myself out of my comfort zone, I decided I wanted to focus my efforts on designing the UI for our game. I had dipped my toes in UI design during the previous semester, and felt enticed to take it even further. I designed the layout and style of our diegetic UI plan, as well as planned and oversaw the implementation pipeline. I talk more about this in my senior reel, which can be viewed below, along with a separate video interview discussing my work.
Junkpunk Arena spent both semesters of our Senior Year in development, with the first semester being a team of five and the second semester expanding to a team of twelve. Due to the massive change in the team dynamic, I think it's reasonable to break my contributions up by semester.
Fall 2020
During this semester I had to wear a lot of hats. We had five team members and only 11 weeks to make a game good enough to get greenlit to continue development for another semester. During this period, I shared the burden of the design documentation with the one other designer on the team at the time, and led the charge on Systems Design, Narrative Design, User Interface Design, and QA Testing.