MANIC MANIA

Manic Mania was a project created during my freshman year at Arizona State University with a team of five, including myself, in seven weeks. I was personally responsible for the direction of the game, programming its core mechanics/upgrade system, and designing the game.

This was the entire team's first time using Unity. Our artist was phenomenal at 2D art, but had little experience with 3D modelling at the time. So, despite creating a game using Unity 3D, we decided to avoid 3D as much as possible. Pulling inspiration from the original Doom, I made a billboard system for our game that would face the sprites towards the camera at all times. This required digging into the camera to handle particles and some other effects later, but it was well worth the effort. Even some of the props that look 3D, like the pillars at the bottom of the arena, are actually billboarded sprites!

As for the design of Manic Mania, we drafted a few design documents and ultimately wound up with the core idea of upgrading yourself and your enemies. This idea would only work if both the player and enemy upgrades had synergy with one another, despite the nature of enemy upgrades making enemies stronger overall. To do this, enemies needed upgrades that made them stronger in specific areas, and the player's upgrades had to behave in the same way. As an example, let's say the player creates a weapon with powerful headshots using their upgrades. They could then choose enemy upgrades that make their enemies' bodies more resilient to damage, while making their enemies' heads less resistant to damage. Now the player is rewarded for playing to their existing strengths, but will have a harder time if they struggle to land headshots. This design concept was a lot of fun to put together, but was quite challenging to nail down - I even remade a good chunk of the items during development to make sure they all fit together!