Ethan Whiton

Choo Choo Boom Boom was my original capstone project, and one that was born from a group of my peers that I had been working with for two years at that point. It was also born from our desire to make an arcade cabinet, a sort of yearly tradition for our college. We wanted to leave something behind and have a legacy at the college, so it only felt natural.

The game itself was a literal on-rails shooter featuring a train with a cannon strapped on top, and I did the level design work for it. It was a far cry from anything I had worked on up until that point, so it was definitely an interesting experience, but a very good learning opportunity. I think the end product turned out great so check it out at at the link below!

Prehistoric Pack was my second capstone project, and one that I joined during the second half of development. I really wanted to work on any type of strategy game, so when the opportunity presented itself, I shot my shot and the team wanted me to join. And while it wasn’t as a level designer, being able to flex my gameplay design chops was a very welcome challenge.

I ended up taking ownership of the Marks found in the game, which started as just simple stat buffs for your dinos. However, I wanted to see how far I could take them, ending up with some marks having cool effects like transforming or upgrading your dinos, or draining your resources to give bigger buffs. In the end, mark builds ended up being some of the fan favorites, and it honestly just made me so happy whenever someone told me how much fun they were having with my marks.

Vallicia in Ruin is a bit of a unique project, as it’s a ROM Hack of Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones. The FE ROM Hacking community holds an annual game jam where people are tasked with making a single chapter, and I finally found the time to do it this year, which was awesome. I actually got my start in game design through ROM hacking, so it was a nice little full circle moment to be able to make this and show it off at my college’s senior show.

The chapter is actually a prologue map for a large-scale project I’ve been thinking of for a while. The story will follow two separated royal siblings, Emma and Ezekiel, as they try to avenge their destroyed homeland. So, why not have a prologue that shows the destruction of that homeland? A bit dark, since it happened when they were still children, but I’m a sucker for flashback sequences, especially if they’re playable.

That being said, there were some sacrifices I had to make for the game jam itself. An original idea I had was to have certain objectives in this map carry over to the main game — stop a thief from stealing treasure to get a little extra money in the main campaign, or defeat a powerful enemy and keep their weapon. And while those couldn’t make the cut for this iteration, it’s long-term ideas like those that make me excited to work on the full game. I’ve already started mapping out characters and the plot in my free time, so stay tuned…

Finally, we have The Infinite Arena. This is my current personal project, and has actually changed a lot from my original plans for the project. Originally, I wanted to try making a grid-based strategy game in Godot, but to give it a unique battle system. I’m a fan of competitive Pokémon and had just finished replaying both Yo-Kai Watch 2 and Fossil Fighters, so the combat system I came up with ended up being an amalgamation of the three. It would have squads of three fight each other with two up front and one in the back, able to switch freely around with each other.

However, as I began prototyping the combat system, I thought “Hey, why not just make this a game itself? Or, at least some sort of tech demo for the system?” So I expanded it a bit, filled up an entire wipe board, moved to Miro, and created an entire game design document over a couple of days. Adding in equipment and weapons, I landed on an infinite-battler type game where you get a team and see how far you can make it with them. I’m hesitant to use the term “roguelike” because it’s so nebulous, but it’s similar. A more apt comparison would be the “Hall of Forms” game mode from Fire Emblem: Heroes or the Pokémon fan game Pokérogue (oh god, maybe it is a roguelike…)