Outta My Way!

Outta My Way! was a personal project created by me during my junior year at Bradley University.

CONCEPTION

At the end of my sophomore year, one of my professors explained to me their process of coming up with new game ideas: he would take the fundamentals of what a game consisted of (players with agency, goals to achieve, rules to follow, etc.) and redefine them to create experiences that questioned what games could be (“What if the game never ended?” “What if the player couldn’t trust the rules?”).

By using this process, I was able to come up with my own question of “what if the player was the obstacle?”

CREATION

Using Unity 2D, the final product didn’t stray far from the concept I initially had in mind – a turn-based strategy game where your previous moves were saved and replicated by “ghosts” of your past selves.

Besides changing the destroyed tiles to reverse adjacent tiles, most of the development for this game mainly focused on improving player feedback through the use of visual effects, enhancing the late-game experience by shrinking the amount of goal tiles over time, and, unsurprisingly, increasing performance via limited the amount of moves remembered.

Outta My Way! not only further acquainted me to tools such as Unity’s particle system and in-engine animator, but was also my first Unity game I’ve ever created outside of assignments and game jams.

A big thank you to Tim Hutchings, creator of “Thousand-Yea-Old Vampire” and the game design professor who made this project possible while helping me realize what a career in games could be