Operation Emu
Operation Emu is a top-down dungeon explorer where you solve puzzles and battle emus to reach the mother emu. You can play the game here.
The game was developed in Gamemaker for a game design module. I was part of a team of four, and was the sole programmer in the project. I worked with the designer and artist to implement features in the engine, and took the feedback gathered by the QA to make improvements.
This was a valuable experience as I had to build the entire game from the ground up, which allowed me to dabble in areas that I hadn't before and learn about game architecture. While there were times I did not know how to implement certain features in Gamemaker, doing research and just trying things out in the engine eventually guided me to a solution.
The schedule for this game was also very intense, with new builds expected every week so playtesting could occur. I made sure to allocate a fixed amount of time every day to consistently work on this project and chose to prioritise core features and critical bug fixes first to ensure a playable build.
Main achievements:
- Setting up a simple event-driven system from scratch in Gamemaker by utilising arrays to hold subscriptions
- Dungeon system that links rooms by doors, teleporting players with a transition
- Enemy emu AI with a state machine
- Player input that stores all active movement inputs and utilises the two most recent ones to move the player