Taiga's Portfolio

These are minor game projects uploaded for the purpose of serving as a resume. Please bear in mind that these games were all developed under a short period of time (6 weeks in most cases) and as part of school group projects. These are the builds that were submitted at the end of those projects and no one has worked on them since. As such, we had little time for balancing, quality of life features and mechanics refinement. Hope you enjoy this collection!

I have also changed my name since making most of these which is why I'm credited as Tova Tärnbrant instead of Taiga Tärnbrant.

Project Gunblade

This game is a personal passion project which I've worked on in the Unreal Engine whenever I've had the spare time. School has been top priority so admittedly I haven't gotten as much done as I'd like but it's moving along at a slow but steady pace and I've learned a lot about using Unreal 5 from this, something which I'd only dipped my toes into before. This game is planned to be a 3rd person shooter 3D platformer hybrid, similar to the Ratchet and Clank series in gameplay but also taking a healthy amount of influence from Jak 2 and Jak 3 in terms of gameplay, tone and world building. While the gunblade itself isn't implemented in any meaningful way yet, I plan to make it a central part of the combat and platforming in the game. Many of the planned features for the game are unfortunately being held up by me learning to animate at the moment but I am currently working on a more refined version of the player controller.

StressRecess

The elevator pitch for this game went something like "What if we made a game about working in an amazon warehouse".  This game has the player delivering everything from dynamite to nuclear waste from one part of the warehouse to another. The player's objective is simply to get each package to where they're supposed to be within the shortest amount of time possible. All while dealing with increasingly badly designed warehouses. 

In this project I was a mechanics and level designer. If I were to pick, I feel like this one is the closest to something I could call a finished product out of all the projects I've been involved in. The graphics look nice, there's a decent bit of music, there's sound effects, controller support, flavor text, the levels have some decent thought and effort put into them and there's optional collectibles in the form of golden boxes. They do nothing. But they exist. The only thing that isn't great is that the tutorial is broken. There's a nuclear waste package that's meant to be delivered but it's impossible because the dropoff spot in the room is set to the wrong type of package. Just remember that some packages need to be scanned by holding a scanner and pressing the E key while a package is in front of you. E is to pick things up and F is to drop them. You can jump with space. That's pretty much all you miss from the tutorial.

Block Dodge & Root

A card game meant to expand on the gameplay of Rock, Paper, Scissors to encourage mind games and strategy. Both players start by picking one of three different monsters to represent them. Each of these monsters have some lore implied by the text on the card and their own unique damage values and health pools. In addition, each monster has an associated enchantment card that the player gets one additional use of if they picked that monster.

The game is divided into three different phases. First is the Equip Phase in which both players choose their attack strategy and defense strategy. There are three options for each. In terms of attack strategies the player can pick between melee, ranged or magic whereas the defensive equivalent are blocking, dodging and rooting respectively, hence the name of the game. 

The second phase is the enchantment phase, during which both players are able to choose whether or not to play an enchantment card to enhance their monsters abilities for the turn. When an enchantment card is played, it's consumed and can't be played again. This can be circumvented once if the card is the card associated with the monster you're using. 

Finally is the battle phase, during which the monsters will attack each other once each. The enchantment cards are applied and the damage to each is calculated. The weaknesses in the game go as follows: Melee is strong against ranged is strong against spell is strong against melee. Block is the defensive equivalent to melee, dodge is the defensive equivalent to ranged and root is the defensive equivalent to spell. When an attack strategy is used against its equivalent defensive strategy, the damage dealt is equal to the attacking monster's DMG (before applying enchantments). When an attack strategy is used against the defense strategy that it's strong against, the damage inflicted is doubled. Finally, when an attack strategy is used against a defense strategy that is strong against said attack strategy, the damage dealt is nullified. 

There is a table displayed while playing the game detailing all this in a simple manner. It is written partially in swedish but it shouldn't be hard to figure out, even for non-speakers.

The game is finished when one of the players has their HP reduced to 0 with said player losing the match. If both reach 0 at the same time it results in a draw. The game doesn't have a single player mode or an AI to play against. But it does have LAN multiplayer. As long as two people are connected to the same network, the game should recognize that and be able to connect the two. 

Ultimately, this one is probably my favorite in terms of design that I've worked on. To make sure that the game was fun, we made paper cutouts representing each card and would play round after round using those, tweaking the rules with each iteration. All before programming even started. And when we did start with programming and art, we had some amazing artists and programmers who were collectively able to put together something that honestly felt way more refined than I imagined it ever would be given the short timespan. 

Underdark Industries

This game was originally conceptualized as a game taking place in the Dungeons and Dragons universe. However, instead of the faux-european Tolkien-esque setting that DnD is known for, this takes place many centuries into the future. The story was meant to be about dwarves being sick of goblins raiding their mining operations and outsourcing work to other races like elves and humans to help them beat the hordes back. Unfortunately, we ran out of time and could never implement the other races into the game. In this build there are only dwarves and goblins.

The game is a tower defense RTS hybrid game in which the player has to direct their workers to mine for ore, collect said ore and then use the ore to build towers which they can then use to defend their base. I was primarily a programmer on this project with a focus on making sure the pathfinding would work. But I was also the one who proposed the concept of the game. 

Unfortunately, this one was constantly swamped with development issues that kept holding us back. Worst of all, the tower placement mechanic in this game broke minutes before the deadline and I can make no guarantee that it'll work as intended. Still, I thought it worth acknowledging as I still learned a lot from being involved in its development.