Jump, swing, and dash around a 3D world as you collect the three missing artifacts to bring the magic back and reverse the spell that turned your teacher into a teapot!
Roles - Project Manager, Lead Designer, Lead Programmer
Screenshots
Breakdown
This project was made for Topics In Games Research -
from January 2022 to March 2022.
The class focused on games conveying a specific emotion, in this case "joy." It's a grad student class, so the project was near entirely created by two undergraduate students, myself included, while the graduate students mostly focused on writing/publishing a research paper about the game.
SwingSpell! was showcased at the 2022 Meaningful Play Conference, held at Michigan State University.
The game is a relatively short, 3 level platformer with optional collectibles, but it's mechanically polished and has a high skill ceiling, which makes it fun to explore in. As players began to get more familiar with the mechanics, they'd take riskier strategies and pull of flashier moves, leading to a joyous fun experience overall - both in the tangible increase in skill, and in the fluid movement potential they've unlocked.
This was definitely a unique project to manage - while the majority of the work was done by 2 people, the 5 other people involved in development still wanted to contribute. Delegating tasks and spreading out work had an added layer of complexity when the work is inherently uneven - but that's where the research paper largely came in.