Project Summary

 Hellfire Hair is a roguelike card battler similar to Slay The Spire, where you play as a hairdresser from hell, battling the hair of the devil's repressed servants to give them makeovers with the help of summons and unique touchscreen mechanics.

Hellfire Hair was showcased at Boston Festival of Indie Games 2022 and PAX East 2023.

Contributions

• Coordinated with the design team, producers, artists, and engineers to implement game systems and content, including the deck building, animation, progression, and combat systems.
• Introduced bi-weekly app builds for closed alpha testing with TestFlight and the Google Play Console.
• Implemented DevToDev custom events to gather data which we considered while designing future content.

What I learned

 As a Programmer at MassDiGI, I was exposed to developing a card battler from scratch and continued adding features after it went live. I learned the overall process of developing a mobile game and how to collaborate with other disciplines. It was a professional insight into what a mobile game studio looks like.

Key takeaways

• Designing game systems with optimization in mind is crucial for mobile games. I learned a lot about game architecture and system designing and how to apply that knowledge to plan for future features and best optimize for mobile platforms.
• How to develop features with users in mind: It's easy to make features that work, but you have to add juice to the feature for a user to want to engage with it. It's also important to consider how every type of player will interact with that feature and collect playtesting data and user feedback to help decide what features are necessary.
• How to work well with people in other disciplines: Clear communication, good collaboration, daily stand-ups, and our application of the agile/scrum methodology were crucial to my team's success.