Castle Climber REDUX

(Technical/UX Design DigiPen Capstone Project)

Physics-based 2.5D Platformer

Castle Climber REDUX

Castle Climber REDUX was a "remaster" of my previous DigiPen student project, Castle Climber. To show my expertise and improvement since that build, I remade the game with new visuals and mechanics.

Team Size

1

My Role

Fullstack Developer

Technical Designer

Duration

10 weeks

Skills Developed

URP Shaders
2D/3D Hybrid Workflow
Shader-Vertex Extrusion
Unity Debug Tools
Normal Mapping
Tesselation
UV Map Animation
Triplanar Mapping
URP Material Keyframing
Custom Lighting Materials

My Contributions

As a solo project, Castle Climber REDUX challenged me to work in all aspects of game design, including but not limited to asset creation, implementation, shader graphs, gameplay and editor programming, UI/UX creation and implementation, playtesting and user research. Every week, I ran presentations sharing my discoveries and technical implementations, receiving and interpreting feedback, and practicing my presentation skills.

Project Hurdles

Since I used Castle Climber REDUX as my capstone project for two separate specialization classes, I had to split focus between the requirements of both classes. Ultimately, since REDUX is a full remaster, that wasn't too much of a problem, but a lot more time was spent documenting what aspects of the projects aligned with both courses requirements than I would have liked, taking precious time away from the project itself. This was also my first time working in a faux 2.5D environment, I had to teach myself a lot of tech on the fly to make the game performant and easy to work in with Unity.

Project Results & Retrospective Evaluation

The "capstone" projects at DigiPen are meant to be semester-long projects to show your mastery/improvement in your design specialization; As a UX and Technical designer, I wanted to demonstrate how much I had grown by remastering a previous project of mine. In an unorthodox fashion for the class structure, I incidentally ended up taking both UX/Tech capstones at the same time (whereas they are meant to be separate classes with separate projects) and Castle Climber REDUX is the result. Even though a lot of time was spent working on visual tech and messing with shaders in a way I hadn't done before, I'm very happy with the game this "remaster" turned out to be.

Documentation