RECURRENCE
Time-travel puzzle adventure game, narrative driven and featuring multiple endings.
In Recurrence, you are a scientist at Chronolabs, a futuristic time travel research facility. You must race against time to stop your boss from finishing a time experiment that could endanger the world!
Explore the facility, Meet Characters, Find Objects, Discover clues and Uncover secrets to successfully apprehend the enemy and save the world! Use your Time Reset ability to solve puzzles but remember time travel has its consequences and can affect your progress!
This game was made in a span of two months, including developing the story, programming the game and producing the cutscenes.
https://miqdad-naduthodi.itch.io/recurrence-demo
NUMVERSE
Combining Mathematics-based puzzle solving and turn-based action, Numverse was a mini 3-week project I made in Unity, primarily for mobile. There is a windows version and a browser version available as well on itch.io
The players can perform attacks by filling out simple math equations and perform special abilities based on the operators (+,-,x) they use. Features multiple playable characters and enemies with diverse abilities.
Available at: https://miqdad-naduthodi.itch.io/numverse
CANDYLAND
After years of working with Unity and Godot, Candyland was my first personal game project with Unreal Engine. I was procrastinating a lot from teaching myself UE and its blueprint system until I finally just decided to sit down and lock in! XD
I was amazed how quickly I was able to get the hang of everything; This was made in a span of around 2 weeks, including all the 3D models, animations that I created myself in Blender to challenge myself! The only external asset that I used was the landscape textures I procured from Fab.
The concept of the game was to be a souls-like parody that is set in this candy-based universe. The player controls a tooth-brush wielding warrior who is invading Candyland and looking to find and defeat the ultimate ruler of the Kingdom! What are the real intentions of the player? Where did the Ants came from? How did the Sugar King become so powerful? So many questions to be answered!
I implemented a simple combat system featuring melee attacks and a heavy ranged attack. I also implemented a damage and heal system similar to the one often seen in souls-like video games. I am also really interested in incorporating the indirect storytelling method that games like Elden Ring often uses and so as a starter, I have an inventory system where the player can access collectibles that has lore attached to them. The most fun I had was creating the Enemy characters' AI system, which felt more streamlined and easier compared to the other engines that I had worked with!
This is still a work-in-progress project, but it is nonetheless very important to me for being a huge confidence-booster for me learning Unreal!
SLASHOT: An Experiment in Game Balancing
This was my final year capstone project for the MS Visualization program at Texas A&M University. I created a simple platform fighter game, with two characters with distinct playstyles and mechanics. I, then proceeded to evaluate the balance of the game using manual playtesting and furthermore created an automated simulation environment for evaluating and improving the game's balance. The simulation environment featured AI-driven versions of these characters which incorporated player patterns and behaviors observed from the initial manual playtesting. The results showed that the automated system was able to improve the overall balance of the game.
While this project mainly dealt with game balancing, I was able to explore various topics like Procedural Content Generation, Online Multiplayer and more theoretical concepts like determinism and symmetry in games.
Here is a link to my research paper:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uNUz7vmTt7anJ2qh99n12qKvCS0tVS_D/view?usp=drive_link
ROOFTOPPLE (UNITY MULTIPLAYER PARTY GAME)
Simple game I developed to learn Unity's NetCode for GameObjects library! It is a party game with a battle-royale style mechanic where the players try to throw bombs at each other to launch enemies off the roofs! Synchronized all important aspects of the gameplay like player interactions (bomb grabbing, throwing, pushing, movement, jump etc.) with the help of RPC implementation, using Network variables, Network gameobjects, transforms and more! Netcode is really a very viable solution from Unity to ease the process of multiplayer implementation in your game projects!
ANCIENT INDIAN VILLAGE EXPERIENCE IN UNREAL ENGINE
Growing up playing video-games like Assassins' Creed and God of War, that portrayed ancient history and culture, I always wondered why there was a lack of games about India's deep history, rich culture and epic mythologies.
Since I wanted to delve more deep into Unreal and its level-building capabilities, I decided to work on this environmental study based on the Ancient South Indian civilization from the Sangam Era (~100 AD). Since a lot of the information we have from this era are very limited and known mainly through literature, I decided to incorporate my own imagination and envision this project as only a loose representation of the civilization.
This project required deep research into culture, architecture and lifestyles of the people of the Sangam Era and I also had to model most of the assets including buildings, houses, temples, pottery and other structures.
While initially planned as a first-person player experience, due to time constraints, this project was made to be an environmental design project. In the future, I would like to program a player interface that allows user to tour the village and learn more about the culture as they progress.
This was a directed study project with Prof. Hadeel Ramadan from Texas A&M University for my MS Visualization program.
Link to a PPT containing all my research and progress screenshots: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1gLdM566L-QzfYwohyK2FHgCCoq0WsNJjFWFNL_0jjq4/edit?usp=sharing
CHAAYAKKADA: THE TEA SHOP GAME
You are a tea-shop owner from modern-day Kerala, struggling to make your ends meet! Navigate through the challenges of an entrepreneur selling Tea and Snacks, keeping the customers happy and satisfied! However, it is not as straightforward as it seems! Look out for special characters including those from Kerala's diverse pop culture, visiting your shop. Who knows, they could be your ultimate savior or your greatest nightmare!
This project was made in a span of three weeks over summer 2024 using Unity and Blender's Grease pencil. Main inspiration for this game was Lucas Pope's "Papers, Please" from 2014. I was impressed by the game's minimalistic approach in not only the artwork but also the gameplay itself, while still not at all struggling to make the players engaged. Myself not being a good 2D artist, but still enjoy sketching characters, this was a fun project just coming up with and sketching out goofy customers for the game!
In the game, the player has the option to serve the customer an item they asked for or not and based on these decisions, the story can progress differently and can even have critical impact to the fate of the shop.
I always enjoy portraying my culture and my country in my works as I feel India in general is still very under-represented, especially in the game industry. Hence, I decided to make the premise of my game, a tea-shop, which is something you would see in almost every nook and corner of just my home state of Kerala!
Available on Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.miqdad.chaayakkada&pli=1
Windows, Android and Web versions available on Itch.io : https://miqdad-naduthodi.itch.io/chaayakkada-tea-shop-game
SPLIT DECISION
Inspired by interactive movies like Bandersnatch (2018) and YouTuber Markiplier's Interactive movie series, me and my project mate Theron Smith (Texas A&M Visualization) wanted to make one for our Time-based Media class final project.
We completed the story, shooting and all development within the time frame of one month. The shots were edited in Adobe Premiere Pro, VFX created with Blender and all development was done in Unity.
Featuring 10+ endings, multiple mini-games and a genre-shifting narrative, Split Decision is now available on Itch.io for Windows and Android:
https://miqdad-naduthodi.itch.io/split-decision-interactive-movie
Below is a rough screenshot of the game's narrative structure as a flowchart. Careful, Spoilers! XD
DESERT DUNES (AI ASSET GENERATION FOR GAMES)
Simple Platformer-style game featuring three levels created for Generative AI class for my MS Visualization course. The project aimed to portray how easy it has become to utilize AI-generated to develop a game from scratch. All artwork, including the character's sprite sheets were generated using AI tools like Dreamstudio, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. Moreover, the code for the gameplay and UI assets were also created with ChatGPT and realized in Unity Game engine.
While the ethical concerns over Generative AI art is very relevant and requires addressing, it is definitely clear that utilizing these tools can help developers and designers in faster prototyping and code debugging.
