Splashworks.com Inc
From 2019 to 2020 I worked as Game Developer at Splashworks.com Inc, Coding games in Unity and Javascript for various high profile brands like Nickelodeon, Topps, and Finders Keepers. Over time I also took on a variety of design responsibilities, Designing levels and minigames and polishing up game feel.
While working at Splashworks we finished and shipped Paw Patrol: A Day in Adventure Bay for iOS and Android devices, and it did quite well, getting something like 10,000+ downloads.
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I primarily worked on the the design and code of the household routine minigames. There was a lot of interesting decision making required in streamlining them for the extremely young target audience, while still having a feeling of fun and meaningful interactivity.
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The goal of the game is somewhat educational, trying to get children into good daily routine habits with the morning and night minigames, and to learn how to navigate streets during the day. It's about as wholesome of an intention as you can get for a commercial mobile game created to sell toys to 4 year olds, and it helps keep me motivated when there are larger goals like this.
I also worked on a game for Finders Keepers, which featured a variety of minigames and a collection of toys. It was pretty neat to work with IPs I grew up with like Spongebob and Spiderman.
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I also got to do a ton of design work on this project, working with our artist design the rules and maps of all the board games and doing lots of testing and rebalancing to make the minigames feel juicy and rewarding.
I also created a bunch of advertisement games for various Topps candy brands, like Bazooka Joe and Push Pops. These were a bit of a challenge as they were some of my first html5 games and I was coding them solo! I think I got a lot better at understanding different languages and testing environments trying to get everything to work on different browsers, platforms, and servers.
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Design on these games was an interesting balance of trying to appease clients and ensure the game would still be enjoyable for players. I often ended up as a middle man trying to propose compromises between good design and good product placement, and working with very interesting constraints.
One of the most interesting design tasks was having to come up with 10 variants of a "Donkey Kong" style level only by moving ladders around; the platforms had to remain the same. I ended up being able to go to some pretty experimental places for such a constrained design, routing the player up, down, and backwards in later levels, leading to some fun challenges that aren't even present in "Donkey Kong" itself.
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