Mines of Balladia was a project I worked on for my DES301 course at DigiPen Institute of Technology during the Spring 2020 semester. The focus of the project was to create a 2D game that had proper feedback in the gameplay. So the goal of the project was to ensure that the player knew when something had occurred with positive, neutral, or negative feedback.

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Overall, I don't have a huge amount to say about the project. It went pretty smoothly as I was pretty good with Unity and programming in C# by the time I took the course. Writing about it now, over a full year later, and after just having played through the final build of the project I've noticed a few things that I would change or things that I wouldn't have done in retrospect, but overall I'm pleased with how it plays and I think it's much better than I remember it being.

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I'll start with the lowlights/criticisms of both the process and the game:

1. I made a boss fight in a brick-breaker, which is totally fine. But giving myself about 2 weeks to create it was a huge mistake. The boss takes three hits to defeat, which is far too few consider the challenge in the previous levels.

2. The ball powerups are far too plentiful.

3. The bricks that spew fire are cool, but I think that it would be more interesting if they stunned the player's paddle, limiting their ability to move and save a ball.

4. I wish that I had included the more interesting powerups that I had prototyped. One being the ability to move the paddle as high as the player wanted. And the other being a powerup that increased the paddle's width. I think they could've better diversified the gameplay.

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Now for the highlights/praises of both the process and the game:

1. Getting my gameplay prototyped within the first week of the project really lowered the pressure and allowed me to pack a little bit more into my game than I would've otherwise.

2. The decision to allow the player to shoot off multiple balls at once was a good one, as it helps players decide their difficulty, and increase intensity and pace.

3. The UI was nice. Both visually interesting, and not particularly distracting. Although I probably could've found better fonts.

4. The gameplay progression was well done, with the exception of the boss fight, and although it could've used a few levels in-between to better bridge some of the mechanics, they'd been cut based on professor feedback saying they drew out the length of the game.

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Overall, this was a project that I definitely learned a lot from, and although I wasn't particularly proud of it immediately after finishing the project, I am quite pleased with what I was able to do with this project.

I have included a video playthrough of the game below.

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