Shunt Balushian
Game Developer
Wiz-Bang! or the game formerly known as Spellstrike was a game I started working on in college. The game idea came to me when I thought about combining two of my favorite game franchises, Pokemon and MMBN (Megaman Battle Network). I loved the elemental aspect of Pokemon and wanted to have that kind of combat on a grid like MMBN. Naturally what followed was the idea to have wizards control these elements, so I had my theme kind of figured out. I at least knew what general direction I wanted the game to go. My classmate became the artist and we started working on our game. While in school we finished a playable prototype, that was showcased at Comic-Con San Jose, with SJSU's Game Dev Club and their arcade machine, which can be seen below.
After college, my classmate and I have continued to work on Wiz-Bang! and have made a lot of changes to the art and gameplay. I wanted to change the art style to something more stylized while maintaining the look of frame by frame animation. I started to look to Disney as inspiration, more specifically Eyvind Earle. With a new art direction established we felt more confident in the presentation of our game. I worked on building a system that was flexible enough to withstand the constant changes needed in development. I also learned how to work with shaders and have built an online multi-player system using Photon. The shaders are used to do things like palette swap or change opacity. The online system currently lacks a proper match-making stage and instead immediately matches pairs as they join, but does in fact allow two remote players to play the game. For online to be truly where I want it to be, I need to add a matchmaking system and add rollback, so I can account for variability in people's connection, thus ensuring a great online experience.
