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 distanced 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 blendspace 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 does dynamic Y-axis damping so vertical movement doesn’t induce motion sickness during long falls, panning that triggers on entering specific zones, and seamless directional swaps when the player reverses.
The part I’d point at, though, is the custom Unity Editor tool I wrote for it. Configuring camera zones by hand-editing components is slow and easy to get wrong, and it meant camera work bottlenecked on me. The tool let the rest of the team place and tune zones directly in the scene view. Tooling that unblocks your teammates is worth more than the feature it configures.
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 — judged not just against our own batch but against entries from all ten cohorts and every Endless Studios programme.
That’s the part worth stating plainly: the field wasn’t three teams, it was every game the studio’s programmes had produced.