Echoes of Marigold

Four months, three people: me on gameplay, one programmer splitting time between shaders and design, and one artist. That artist’s work is why we walked away with an award.

The loop

It isn’t a pure combat Metroidvania. The player explores a distant kingdom, takes delivery tasks from NPCs, and fights their way through to complete them, earning coins that upgrade the bag and weapon, which in turn opens up harder deliveries. Lore surfaces through exploration and completed tasks rather than through exposition.

That structure mattered for my side of the work: a loop built on carrying something somewhere means movement and combat have to stay readable while the player is under a soft time and risk pressure they’ve opted into.

Movement

Metroidvania movement lives or dies on the transitions. A player spends the whole game jumping, and any hitch between the jump, the apex, the fall, and the landing is felt immediately even if it’s never consciously noticed.

I built the movement on a 2D Blend Tree covering idle, jumping, mid-air, falling, and landing, with directional transitions blended rather than cut. Running, jumping, and attacking all had to stay synchronised with their animations: an attack that fires before its animation reads as unresponsive, and one that fires after reads as laggy.

Camera

The camera got more attention than most people would expect for a 2D game. Built on Unity Cinemachine, it has dynamic Y-axis damping, customisable panning when the player enters trigger zones, and seamless directional swaps when the player turns around.

I also wrote a custom Unity Editor setup for it, so the camera zones were easy to configure.

Combat and enemy AI

Responsive attack mechanics, damage tracking, synchronised animations, pathfinding, and enemies that respond dynamically rather than running fixed patterns.

Outcome

Second in cohort. Then, in May 2025, Best Game Art Direction at the UAE Game Makers Competition 2025, judged not just against our own batch but against entries from 10+ cohorts and every Endless Studios programme.