Loralai (January 2019- July 2019)

Loralai is my final project for my Bachelor's program at Full Sail. It is a puzzle platformer- heavily inspired by Ori and the Blind Forest- where the player is a young girl who is wandering through an eerie forest, and comes across some friendly faces. The player can switch between playing as the little girl or her doll in order to solve puzzles, and eventually face against a boss. In the end, the young girl realizes she will not be finding her way out of this eerie forest because she has been dead.

I have learned a significantly large amount of knowledge from this experience. From team dynamics, production styles, good design practices, to coding practices.

I did the entirety of the UI for this project, which includes the code and art (with the exception of they key buttons on the controls menu).

I also created the scene and game management. When the player transitions through doors, I created a system that will load the scene connected to that door, if its not loaded.

Small snippet of the code for the scene loading

This will also move the player into the next scene. Then if the scene is loaded, it will also unload it and move the player to the hub. This was super integral to our game because we desired to have all of the levels connected to one central hub, and have the hub never be unloaded. The

way I created the door system made it so we could create as many connections to the hub as we wanted.

I also created the pickups and the system for which they are dropped. When the player kills enemies or jumps on an "environmental pickup", orbs will spawn and the player will be able to pick them up to gain health, xp or energy (save resource). I created the system that spawns them, decides drop rate, adds force on them towards the player, connects the collection of them to the UI, and despawns them.

Another piece of the project I'm super proud of is the ability buff menu. I created the entire thing, from code to art. Each image depicting a buff was created by me in Adobe Illustrator, each line connecting the buttons was custom created in Illustrator as well. I also coded the whole interaction. I created the system that changes the buff descriptions, names and images on the left depending on what button the player was holding. I did this by storing all of the necessary information within the button object, and pulling from that on hover. I also connected each buff with the player. For example, if the player bought a health upgrade I made sure it increased the player's max health logically and aesthetically (UI).

This is an in progress project so this post will be updated with more information in the future.