This Side Up

Gameography

Genre: Casual, Tone: Goofy, sarcastic,
Description: A zany box-launching-and-stacking game (fka "Handle with Care") that ranked in the top ten of the Godot Wild Jam.

Project

My Roles

  • Producer: Managed a team of four (+ programmer, two 3D artists)
  • UI Designer: Modeled, designed, and programmed the 3D-animated splash screen and interactive escape menu.
  • 3D Artist + Environment Designer: Created the port environment, inclusive of modeling the ships, cranes, containers, and all 2D assets.
  • Writer: Wrote all publishing copy including logline and synopsis.

Skills Utilized

  • 3D Modeling and Animation: Asset Creation and Environment Design (Blender)
  • In-engine Development (Godot Engine)
  • Programming (GDScript)
  • UI / UX (Figma)
  • Graphic Design (Adobe Photoshop)
  • Technical Writing (Microsoft Word)
  • Project Management (Trello)
  • Team Collaboration and Management (Discord)

You are an AI program that must stack boxes as a profession. Lose and you're deleted!

SYNOPSIS

Welcome to 2025! All humanity has been exterminated or deported to Antarctica, and robots of the near-future are constantly shipping each other things. What are they shipping? THINGS!

You are an AI program that is more poorly coded than the rest of your well-refactored peers. Not only that, but you also exhibit traits of a normal-intellect human! Masquerade carefully under your digital overlords and successfully stack boxes onto the factory scale to keep your unpaid job as a computerized slave.

This title was developed in nine days for the 73rd edition of the Godot Wild Jam.

Gallery

I modeled, designed, and animated a box-launching sequence for the opening splash screen. The player holds down the space bar key to charge up the launcher, and lets go to launch it for fun, high-octane gameplay. Ongoing evolution in UI abilities, I animated and programmed a fully functional menu that pops out when the escape key is pressed. After deciding to expand the game out post-jam, additional environments were made, including a moon environment by our lead programmer. I subsequently created the port environment... ... modeling and texturing all low-poly assets in Blender, and exporting them into the engine. Considering mobile as a target market, it was very important to optimize the assets for performance. Thus, I leaned on textures (images) to "fake" depth; radically reducing our poly counts down to make the game more performative, all-the-while allowing us to add far more assets to the scene and make it more realistic. One of three ships I modeled for the port environment; this pirate ship is made of only 489 polygons, keeping us well beneath our ideal 50,000-poly limit for a mobile-optimized environment. I created and managed tasks on Trello for the team, ensuring that progress was visual for motivation, and all information discussed in our Discord server was centralized.

UI Design

Splash Screen and Escape Menu