Mantle (2025)

What I Did

As one of just 3 engineers, I had ownership of a large portion of the game, along with 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.

I was especially effective in this role because my design skills complemented the purely technical skill of the other two engineers. While my Lead Engineer implemented backend systems and editor tools, I was able to consistently deliver corresponding frontend features that were polished and easy to use, helping translate between the pure engineers and the art and design teams:

• Narrative system that pulls from Google Sheets to JSON and into game
• Dynamic text and news video playback
• Diegetic desktop interface
• Custom minigames for each of the 6 enemies
• Numerous bugfixes and small features across the project

I not only wrote the underlying code for this interface 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.