Here’s where I showcase all of my projects that didn’t see the light of day, for whatever reason, or games too small to be featured in my main page.
Crypt Crawl (Jam)
November, 2020
My role in this project: Main developer & Artist
Crypt Crawl was a game made for a game jam hosted by my college in November, 2021. They organized groups that had 2 members of each year (6 members per group) and I was lucky to be in a group with really hardworking people. We decided on an idea fairly easy, the theme was “Death is not the end”.
On this project in particular, since I was so busy programming everything and making all of the art, I had no time to do the level design, but the task was swiftly done by one of the team members and I implemented everything. We managed to get 3 small levels which is super nice for a game jam. You can try the game in the link below!
Planet Pulverizer (Jam)
February, 2019
My role in this project: Everything
Planet Pulverizer was a game I made for blackthornprod jam #2. The theme was “Mini Planets”, which was very unfortunate since ludum dare 38’s theme was “A Small World”. A big pet peeve of mine is when game jam organizers don’t do proper research before deciding a theme, as game jams with very similar themes discourage creativity and variety!
Nevertheless, this is a very arcade-y game , very fun to make! I somehow managed to implement quite a respectable amount of content for the time provided to me. The game has a tech tree, and minimalistic procedural planets. I also got some experience using hack’n plan, as I made milestones and sprints for everything I did on this project. The game ranked 4th place out of 269.
Pigment Forest (Jam)
November, 2018
My role in this project: Everything
Pigment Forest is a small, unfinished game I made for The Games Factory Jam 9. The theme was a sound effect of a bell ringing, which was quite interesting.
Even though it’s unfinished it was great to develop the mechanics of the game. I love playing around with color values and designing mechanics based on colors and this little project definitely set some foundations for some future mechanics in other games.
Pew Pew Galaxy
October, 2016
My role in this project: Everything
Pew Pew Galaxy was a very short lived project but it was a nice development challenge for me. I managed to implement some unprecedented (for me) features, like modular ship building, and importing 3d models with different materials on a single model and editing said materials at runtime.
But all of this is not as important as the controls that I wanted to make.
I wanted to make a space shooter with comfortable controls. Left buttons are to rotate left and shoot with your left gun, and the same for the right buttons. Pressing both the left and right movement buttons moved you forward. I forgot what the slider looking things on the picture were supposed to be (pardon me, this was many years ago). I’m not a fan of virtual joysticks as regular phone screens have no tactile feedback, but if you always have your fingers hovering on static buttons your brain can “lock” their position down if you get used to them, so it’s much easier to play.
I kept trying to perfect the movement system but I was never truly happy with it. If I was stumped with it I would proceed to develop other mechanics, such as…
A ship builder!
Procedural, modular ships!
The ability to steal parts from fallen enemy ships!
As time went on, even though I had fun making these side mechanics, I felt that the game wouldn’t be fun if the controls weren’t fun. So I decided to shelf the project and maybe one day I could try to revisit it and develop those sweet, sweet controls.
I have no playable builds as the project didn’t have any significant amount of gameplay! What you see on the gifs is essentially what the game had.
Up, Up!
March, 2016
My role in this project: Everything
In 2016 I made a game for Ludum Dare 36, called WindPowered! It was my first fully finished Game Jam, and strangely I did it while resting properly and not stressing too much about the jam. Unfortunately it was one of the first Ludum Dares where they did not hold votes at the end!
I was so impressed with how quickly I made this game that I wanted to try to turn it into an actual mobile game. And so Up, Up! was born.
I implemented a couple of new features and tried to add a crafting system to the game, which unfortunately worked better on paper.
On that year I attended Unite 2016 São Paulo, where I had the honor of showing the game to Lauren Koester, who at the time was the Business Development Manager at Unity Ads. She gave me some tips on how to monetize my game which was great!
Eventually life got in the way and I had to shelf the project. Years after the fact I tried to keep developing it, but working on code that I previously wrote a year before is very challenging – as I had to remember every variable, every thought process, not to mention the bugs…
I hope I can pick it back up one day and remake it from scratch with my current development knowledge. I’m sure i’d have a way easier time making it now, that i’m much wiser – for sure i’d scrap the entire crafting system.
Astria
February, 2015
My role in this project: Everything
Astria is a mobile game that I started making in 2015. I noticed a lack of survival games for smartphones so I tried to make this cute, simple survival game in space.
This was my first solo project after I got my Bachelor’s in Game Design. I was eager to try out my newfound knowledge that I acquired in my final project for University, Ravina.
I based the entire UI and controls of the game on the usability concepts explored on my research paper. I created a contextual virtual joystick that had its handle turn into a button to interact with things close to the main character.
While keeping the concepts from my research paper in mind, I also designed a UI for purcashing items that keeps all the important information at the top and important buttons in the regions that are more easily accessible with just one hand.
While making Astria was a delightful experience, I eventually realized there would be very little potential in terms of gameplay. I changed a couple of things and tried to see if the game was more fun but eventually I realized that the problem was too deeply ingrained in the core design of the game, and I had to drop development.
If you want to try a (very buggy, with many incomplete features) demo of the game, you can get it and install on your android device using the button below.
Igor Hatakeyama 