Portfolio

Arena-Based Bullet Hell Survival

Endless, wave-driven combat in a sustained area, where your primary goal is to survive as long as possible. Difficulty escalates via enemy count, patterns, and bullet density, culminating in a boss encounter.

Three-Type Bullet System

Each bullet type demands a different response:

Red (Dodge-Only)

• Cannot be interacted with
• Pure avoidance challenge

Blue (Dash-Through)

• Player dashes through to charge special attacks
• Encourages risky, aggressive movement

Green (Deflecable)

• Can be reflected using a shield
• Angle-based redirection toward enemies

Enemy Variety

Multiple enemy archetypes with:

• Unique movement behaviors (chase, orbit, stop-and-fire)
• Distinct attack patterns (spread, circle, burst)

Enemies telegraph special attacks with animations, and the boss fight remixes existing enemy patterns as a test of skill.

As the Game Designer and Team Lead of Motus, I:

• Designed core gameplay features.
• Lead sprint planning, coordinated meetings, and updated documentation.
• Hosted playtests and reported bugs to the development team.

Motus was developed by a 6-person team. I served as both the Game Designer, Team Lead, and Artist.

The demo was completed in 5 months. To keep development on track, the team used:

• Trello: task management & sprint tracking

Motus is one of the projects from my undergraduate degree that I look back at fondly. It was one of the first times I led a team and the first time I was in charge of the design for a game. In hindsight, with my current experience as a designer and producer, there are a lot of things I would do differently. However, there are a lot of valuable lessons I learned from this game:

Lesson 1: There’s a lot more to designing a game than a cool mechanic.

When I pitched the idea, my focus was on the movement, bullet types, and fast and satisfying gameplay. However, once the mechanics were implemented in a sandbox environment, we reached a “what now?” moment. I had not put a lot of thought into how we would handle progression or onboarding.

In the end, to tackle our lack of progression issue, we created a difficulty-scaling system in which the game would spawn harder and/or more enemies as the player completes more rounds, culminating in the boss fight in the 10th round.

However, by the last weeks of production, we realized we hadn’t added any way to onboard the player. In an attempt to find a quick solution that would help with this, we created sandbox mode, where players could get familiar with the game’s mechanics without stakes. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the cleanest solution, and did not address the issue completely; however, I learned from this, and now think about onboarding in all my games’ pre-production period.

Lesson 2: Adjust your scope to your team’s capabilities.

Since it was one of my first times leading a team, and also one of the first big projects I worked on, I still had little to no experience with production.

In this class format, the professor would select the game pitches that seemed the most realistic to work on in a class format with a small team, after which, students would choose which project they wanted to join. Due to this, I had no way of knowing my team’s size, strengths, or capabilities before coming up with the pitch.

The lack of knowledge of my team’s skill set, experience, potential velocity, and the small amount of time allocated to designing the game all contributed to a project with a scope that was inappropriate for the team and the development time we had in the semester.

This isn’t to say that the people I worked with weren’t talented; my team was a delight to work with, and Motus wouldn’t be what it is without them. I think this was a wonderful learning experience for all of us. However, if I could do stuff differently, I believe that once we had assembled a team, we should’ve reassessed the project’s scope and come up with a clearer plan that was within our team’s capabilities to complete.

In the end, throughout the semester, we adjusted to create a demo of what the complete experience for Motus could feel like, and I’m immensely proud of what we created.