Untethered is a 2.5D Metroidvania created for our University Games Studio project. I acted as Lead Designer, managing a team of 4 artists and 2 technical artists.

My responsibilities were to manage the designers and artists, communicate with the producer and programmers, plan the game and assign tasks, and design the main mechanics and about half of the levels. I also acted as the musician and sound designer.

Technologies used:

• Unity – Game Engine
• C# – Programming Language
• Git – Version Control
• Photoshop – Design Diagrams/Maps
• FLStudio – DAW

The project taught me a lot as I have never worked in a leadership capacity before. The challenge of producing a quality product, making sure my team members were progressing on their tasks but were not overworked, and keeping in mind the bigger picture was an compelling balancing act.

We produced the game as a ‘vertical slice’, meaning we produced 3 of the planned 8 areas in a full game. We played widely and took inspiration from metroidvanias such as ‘Hollow Knight’, ‘Metroid: Dread’, and ‘Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown’.

Designing enemies that were reusable, fit their environment and worked well with other traps/enemies was a lot of fun. It required a lot of playtesting to balance their difficulty while still keeping variety in their movesets.