Megalomagicka

A rogue-like where a mage fights their way through a series of increasingly difficult rooms in search of the lord of the dungeon and escape the death trap they've found themself in.

Core Gameplay Loop

The player begins in a room with one enemy. Defeating this enemy causes a set of three rewards to appear and adds gold to the player's purse. The three rewards buff the player's stats and/or replace their abilities. Only one reward can be chosen per room. Next, the player exits through the only open door with a colored object above it, that was previously closed. The colored item indicates one of the guaranteed rewards for the next room, with the color being the rarity, and the object being the slot for that item. This cycle continues as the player mows through rooms of enemies and rapidly becoming more and more powerful. Eventually, one of the rooms will lead to a shop, marked by a sack of gold above the a door, where the player can spend the coins they've gained to get more upgrades and abilities. After clearing 10 rooms, the player reaches the boss and exits the dungeon, beating the game.

Combat is executed using 6 abilities: a primary ranged ability that costs mana, a secondary melee ability that recovers said mana, a dash/movement ability, a defensive ability, a utility ability (the slot for abilities that don't have a clear category), and an ultimate ability that does massive damage in one way or another.

Contact

I'm always looking for new and exciting opportunities. Let's connect.

info@mysite.com

123-456-7890

What I Worked On

For this game I worked on the:

Room generation
- How and when rooms are generated
  - Loads without changing scenes
- The next two (or three) rooms that each room can lead to
Randomness
- Which items, enemies, and rooms spawn
  - and their chances of appearing
Rewards
- One (slot type and rarity) guaranteed from the room indicator prior
- The other two generated randomly
Card text
- The message and image displayed on each item's popup
Some abilities
- The dash
- The teleport
- Some general cleanup/bugfixing helping others
Enemy design and workflow
- All enemies, how they function, and how they are spawned
Bug fixing and playtesting
- Around 30 - 40 hours of playtesting
Setting up and maintaining prefabs
Distributing and making builds of the game

Struggles and Takeaways

Many of my struggles during this project were in miscommunication. The engineers and artists for this project rarely interacted, resulting in a rift that formed and led to a less-than-ideal final product. While each practice had produced something that they were proud of, the lack of coordination meant that there were compromises and setbacks that didn't show their work in the best of lights.

That being said, I have three major takeaways from this project:

Roadmap designs and consult with others over them multiple times before, during, and after implementation
Prefab everything that you can, as early as you can
Make sure there is a clear line of communication for as many members of the project as feasible

While it may not be possible to reach every member of every team, I have made it a personal habit to document every action I take in a project that could shape its design or function. If there is a discussion I am having with someone, I make notes. If I code a script and make a prefab for enemies, levels, mechanics, even trees, I will sit down and make a tutorial for how that prefabbed system should be setup and what it should do. My goal is to make it so that someone can tell how it works, at least visually, without knowing how to code. These are then shared through whatever pipeline I have access to that isn't going to pester people with notifications. The goal is to give people a chance to see what I am doing and why I am doing it. Though, I do understand that not all projects will be structured like this and will not have teams or workflows that exactly or even closely resemble this one (23 people, with groups based on discipline), so while I will continue to document, I will gladly leave it to a superior to determine whether what I write down needs to be shared with others.