Mantle (2025)

Working with a large team

Creating a game alongside a team of over 20 people has been a very different experience from solo development, but the interdisciplinary skillset I built making games on my own proved to be a perfect fit for the Mantle engineering team. As one of just 3 engineers, I still have ownership of a large portion of the game, but have the added responsibility of communicating with almost every other team on the project: adding artwork, sound, and narrative into engine, understanding the goals of the design team and implementing their ideas, and meeting weekly with the director and lead producer to set timelines for the game.

The reason I've been so effective in this programming role is that I complement the purely technical skill of the other engineers. While my team members—upperclassmen and grad students—handle the most complex backend tasks, I am consistently delivering features that look good and are easy to use, helping translate between the pure engineers and the art and design teams. For example, I built almost every aspect of the desktop scene, which plays between every battle and delivers the majority of the game's story.

In order to get this scene functioning as well as it does, I not only wrote the underlying code but also added color-coding, spacing, reformatted our narrative documents to work with the dynamic dialogue, edited the UI files for readability, and added a number of color transitions and animations. I wasn't even tasked with doing most of these improvements, but spent my free time to include them because I cared about the project working as well as possible. As a result, Mantle has consistently been noted as one of the only MFA projects that is on schedule and looking like a polished game.