Glitch Escape

The Game

Glitch Escape is a 3D platformer set in the astral realm. This game was originally inspired by sleep paralysis and the metaphysical theories surrounding astral projection being one of the gateways to high dimensions. The game tells a story about characters who struggle with their reality and falls victim to an antagonist who wants to keep them forever in the "astral realm". The protagonist must face their fear, the antagonist: a version of themself that does not want to wake up, in order to save the others. Swap between two different level layouts; the astral realm, in which the player can only survive for a few moments, and the overworld, where the player must dodge lethal obstacles to try and collect all of the shards necessary to free each of the three hostages.

My Role(s)

On Glitch Escape, I was fortunate enough to be able to operate on the team as their technical lead, despite being a junior “external collaborator” who wasn’t technically in the class. My duties as a technical lead were to help run design discussions, introduce members of the team to working in the Unity Engine, writing significant amounts of code, helping with technical issues, and doing code reviews as well as executing merges for a significant portion of pull requests to our Github repository. I also worked on the the team as an assistant producer, managing our submission to SGDA, publishing the game to itch.io, researching how to publish the game through steam, and managing our submission to UCSC’s game showcase, as well as designing our logo and other assets used on our website/twitter/itch pages. From a programming standpoint, I was responsible for the first pass on the wall jump mechanic, a prototype audio system, full implementation of the user interface, and extensive debugging as bugs emerged.