Defenestration!
A 1v1 fighting game where you defeat your opponent in fencing and defenestrate them!
Duration: April 2023 - July 2023 (3 months)
Roles: Team Lead, UI designer, Game Design
Skills: Project Management, Project Planning, Google Suite, Procreate, Clip Studio Paint
Led a team of 9 student game developers
Organized team meetings and meetings agendas in a Agile development enviornment
Scheduled and allocated work to members
Designed UI menus, layouts and gameflow
Defenestration! started as a small idea I had about after playing Footsies by HiFight, a spacing based game that focuses on teaching players the fundamentals of the concept "Footsies" in most fighting games, where spacing and timing of an attack gives you an advantage in a match. I was very inspired on how Footsies was a simple game yet was able to demonstrate how important the concept of Footsies was to competitive fighting games.
I pitched my idea to couple of my friends and we spent a whole night talking about out how we can create a fencing based game off of this concept! Couple days later, I got more of my friends onto this idea and we formed a small group of student game developers to not only make this our project for a school quarter but also a VGDC (Video Game Development Club at UCI) quarterly project!
Design
As I started to develop my idea, I created a master document, to jot down what I wanted in the end project. Throughout the documentation, I had many conversations with my team, asking for feedback on what can work and what couldn't work. Eventually this master document laid the foundation for our development plan, allowing us to understand what needed to be done.
And...Brainstorming!
Throughout the whole project, my team and I had many ideas that we thought could be added to the game. Each meeting we had, we would have fun tangents brainstorming the possibilities of the game, sometimes pushing the boundaries of the scope of the game. I encouraged my team to keep brainstorming while keeping in mind the essense of the game so we don't go over the scope. This culiminated in the creation of the Brainstorming document where we would write down all of our fun ideas down. In fact, some of them made it to the Master Document as a final decision and in the final game!
Artifacts
Here are some of the artifacts of development I made. My main thought process while designing the different screens was to make sure that every element is thematically coherent to our aesthetic which was focused on historical european art and stained glass.
Weapon Select
A quick sketch of the weapon select layout that was the basis of final implementation.
Character Select
A layout for the character selection screen.
Stage Select
A quick sketch of the stage select.
Character Health Bars
Some of the early concepts of character health bars that get displayed during a match.
Logo Brainstorm
Early in development, I sketched out possible logo designs. The final version was a combination of the last two ones!
Weapn Select Frame
An asset of the weapon select that I created.
Character Select Frame
A frame I created for the character select menu.
Final Product and Z3 Presentation
Our final game grew to be much more than I expected. From the original idea, my team generated more ideas as we went and ended up expanding the original idea to include a character select, weapon select and a stage select that was ahead of what I thought we could accomplish. I was so proud of our hard work that I presented the game at VGDC's Z3 convention where they celebrate student developed games. I was glad that many people enjoyed playing our game as they stopped by our booth.
