Path of the Glowflies is a 3D top-down turn-based fantasy tactics project developed in 5 months by a 6 person team at VFS. It was our final project for the Game Design program and a culmination of the skills we had learned over the course of a year. The game is about two children, twin siblings Stella and Theo, who must travel through a world of eternal darkness to search for their missing parents. On their journey through the shrouded woods, the children come across signs of previous life, hostile shadow creatures, and guiding swarms of magical glowflies. The glowflies give the children special abilities which serve as the primary mechanics of the game: a tether of light between the twins which can activate and damage colliding enemies, an anchor that can extend the tether into more configurations, a slingshot that taunts enemies towards the user, and a burst that displaces enemies further away. The project was influenced mechanically and aesthetically by Inkbound, Don’t Starve, League of Legends, and various turn-based RPGs, with some narrative inspiration from non-gaming media such as Over the Garden Wall. For this project I took the roles of programmer, audio artist, and video editor for the gameplay trailer and tutorial events. I also played a major role in designing the gameplay, assisting in determining the interactivity of the game’s systems.

Programming Contributions:

• Player movement for combat and non-combat sections including controlled movement for the primary character, following movement for the secondary character, and the maximum movement radius. 
• Shadow-casting object functionality, which allowed certain environmental objects within the player light radius to cast visible shadows, separate from the engine’s lighting system. Since the light radius VFX was made with one material, shadows had to dynamically update their count and positions in world-space through code. 
• Player features such as shared health, shared fuel amount, and individual movement capability. 

Programming Software Used:

• Unity (Game Engine)
• C# (Coding Language)

Audio Contributions:

• Music
• Sound
• Voice Acting Coordination

Audio Software Used:

• Logic Pro (DAW for composition, production, and editing)
• ProTools (DAW for recording voice acting)
• FMOD (Audio Middleware)

Video Contributions:

• Trailer
• Tutorials

Video Software Used:

• OBS (Game Capture)
• Adobe Premiere (Editing Software)

Link: pigeonpartygames.itch.io/path-of-the-glowflies

Developers:

• Avery Chace: Project Manager / VFX Artist
• Brenden Lyske: Level Design / Narrative Design
• Rafael Pastor: Environment Artist / UI Artist
• Dante Rios: Character Artist / 3D Animator
• Rayne Choy: Programmer / 2D Artist / 2D Animator
• Cameron Damude: Programmer / Audio Producer

Collaborators:

• Megan Thorne: Dialogue
• Ethan Beitel: Voice Actor (Theo)
• Skye Carter: Voice Actor (Stella)