Mycelium
Cellar Bog
ROLE
Programmer
GENRE
Action Roguelike
DESCRIPTION
Grow your spore community enhancing their abilities through a variety of upgrades then explore a post-extinction world scavenging what you can to fight menacing insects.
YEAR
May 2024 - July 2024
TEAM SIZE
19
ENGINE
Unity
Tweaks
UX
My main task was to take the game that was already there and flesh it out and make it feel better for the player. I did this through improving feedback, improving clarity, and making player choice more meaningful.
I made many small adjustments to all over the project like adding screen shake, fading objects out instead of instant destruction, and many particle system adjustments. I made larger changes through new abilities and the attribute system.
Ability Tweaks/Revisions
There are 16 different abilities in the game. The ones players got earlier had more polish then the harder to unlock ones so one of the goals I was given was to liven them up, make adjustments, or -if necessary- make entirely new abilities that served the same purposes but with more flair.
3 Abilities were completely redone.
8 Abilities had additional visuals or tweaks
Undergrowth Version 1
Undergrowth Version 2
Attributes
What are attributes?
Attributes are special modifiers to weapons, they can give a variety of stat buffs as well as special custom buffs like life steal, poison, critical hits, knockback, and more. They are meant to give more meaningful choice to when a player picks up a weapon. There are only 3 types of weapons and 3 materials of weapons. Once a player got the weapon they liked they had no reason to switch. With attributes as well as per stage weapon scaling there is a much more meaningful choice players make when selecting a weapon.
How do they work?
They are applied through components that are placed on the weapon. There is an attribute manager that handles how this information is displayed condensing or removing redundant information. Some of the main ways these attributes affect their weapon is through changing their stats, activating code upon hitting an enemy, and activating abilities.
Attribute Examples
Multi-Attribute Examples
What I Learned
Preexisting Team
This was the first time I joined a team in which the game was already fleshed out and at a pretty good point, the game was not done but it was in its beta stage. I was brought onto the team to expand on the systems that were already there. I had to learn quickly familiarize myself with how they had set up the game and its code so I could get to work.