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.
GateRunners is a TCG (Trading Card Game) that I always have running in the back of my head so to speak. The inspiration for the game comes from the many card games I have played and MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) games like League of Legends and Warcraft 3. I have been working on the rules and mechanics for over a few years now and have a playable version that I play with a group of friends. I also presented the game at Protospiel 2018. Below is some original artwork for the game that I commissioned. I plan to port the game to mobile and PC once complete, as well as produce the physical game. Which is probably very far into the future, because the game has its fair share of problems. That being said I often find myself thinking about the rules, or new strategies. My biggest problem is the resource system in the game. It constantly changes because nothing ever feels just right. But I am sure with time GateRunners will get there eventually!
