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A Horror Metroidvania, Starring a Royalty-Free Piglet
A Horror Metroidvania, Starring a Royalty-Free Piglet
A Pig’s Phobia is a 2D platformer created for the Aug-Sep 2024 Metroidvania Game Jam, though I continued development for several months after. Largely drawing from the Winnie the Pooh mythos, the game places players in the shoes of Piglet as he fights and flees from bloodthirsty distortions of the main cast, gradually unlocking abilities and gaining access to new areas in the 100-Acre Wood. I was the main gameplay programmer in a team of 5 people and assembled the game in Unity with C#.
What I Did:
What I Did:
Created a modular player ability system, allowing for seamless collection, selection, and use of the 6 unique abilities in the game, like the pogo stick and grappling hook.
Crafted a save system that preserves item placement, enemy status, and player inventory and world location between play sessions.
Assembled a designer-friendly on-rail camera with options for snapping and zoom control to boost cinematic potential.
An Ambitious Horror Experience
An Ambitious Horror Experience
This project was incredibly fun to work on and certainly my most ambitious 2D platformer to date. When I joined a Metroidvania-oriented game jam with a one-month development window, I invited my friends from the Polypore team to hop in and create a fun game as a break from the scale of our main project. While they helped with the art, sounds, level design, and UI, I set out to test the boundaries of what I could produce using my present coding knowledge and experience.
Within that month, I crafted from scratch my best-feeling and most cohesive 2D player controller, a modular ability system with six unique abilities to collect, equip, and use, three base enemies and three boss fights, and a large variety of environmental hazards and platforming tools. While we were ultimately not able to complete the game in time, I used the momentum from the jam to continue work on the game for several more months, striving to make it as close to content-complete and industry quality as possible.
Now without time constraints, I was able to try my hand at crafting industry-standard game features I'd never had the opportunity to explore. I created a save system that tracked items collected and enemies defeated on a per-room basis, a smooth, modular room transition system, and an on-rails camera with designer-friendly snapping and zoom control options.
I was also able to truly realize the Metroidvania-style of level design that opened itself up as more abilities were unlocked, designing over 40 unique and interconnecting rooms to explore. This project was as much a learning experience as it was a showcase of what I'm capable of as a game programmer, and I'm quite proud of what I was able to present in the final product.
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