Ardiana Fejzullahu

A multiplayer underwater mining game developed as a two-month university project with a team of 10. I was responsible for project management and led the team throughout development, while also working extensively on gameplay programming and creating the game's world from the ground up.

This project is currently in the early stages of development. It's a cozy farming game with fishing, farming, crafting, and animal handling. The player lives on a farm in the town of Mapleton and can interact with NPCs who run different shops around the town, selling goods, tending animals, growing crops, and befriending neighbors.

I'm making this project entirely by myself: game design, gameplay loop, gameplay programming, animations, and concept idea. This project is for people like me: people who love playing cute and cozy games casually, without the stress of the real world.

Every segment in the game is created by me, from paper sketches to world building. This project shows the creativity and ambition I have for games and for game development. I have poured my entire heart into this project and am excited to eventually release a demo on Steam.

Colosseum is a 2D combat platformer where you must defeat a boss with three unique and entertaining phases. The player faces challenging AI combat and has to maneuver through harsh terrain to win. It's a fun, quick, chaotic 2D platformer where anything is possible.

For this game my main roles were level design and VFX artist, a school project I worked on with five others over four weeks. I created the slash attack on the character and the fire effect on the torches using VFX graphs in Unity. I learned a lot about VFX on this project, and it pushed me out of my comfort zone of programming to do something more daring.

I also had a great time designing the starting scene: the tunnels of the Colosseum where fighters gear up before entering the arena. I only had about a week to make this scene and still managed to execute it well. Every prop was placed with intention and a clear design purpose in mind.

Left Behind is a large school project made by over 50 students, with more than 20 unique, personally crafted levels. The project shows off each student's level, lighting, and narrative design skills.

On this project we were taught the theory behind lighting and level design: environmental storytelling, narrative space and story, composition, emphasis, reinforcement, and visibility through lighting. We used modular kits, such as a shared room module, and through it built a new, unique story each. Although every student used the same modules, no two scenes looked alike.

I took a lot from this course; I learned so much about level and lighting design that I now focus on it a lot in my own projects. I now notice, every time I play a game, how a developer has placed everything with intent, and when a game lacks that intent.

This was a school project where we recreated the game Hearthstone from scratch. The main focus was learning to work in a large group. We were over 30 students on one team.

This project came with its challenges. It was difficult at first to properly communicate with my group members, especially since it was the first project in a group this large. To overcome that, we started using Scrum, an agile project management framework, which helped us organize and assign tasks with ease.

Although the main goal was teamwork and agile project management, I learned a lot of gameplay programming through this project. I did the majority of the gameplay solo, which taught me who to trust with what, and how to adapt when things don't go the way they were planned.

Toadally Lit is a cute and comfy platformer game, though the cute, comfy art style makes it deceptively difficult, timing jumps to land on platforms you can't fully see while airborne, hopping across moving lilypads, and reaching a firefly surrounded by spikes. It's as amusing as it is difficult, and thoroughly addicting.

This was my first ever project working in Unity with C#. I did the majority of the gameplay programming and level design, and it was my first introduction to Unity. It's a great way to see how far I've come: a game like this, which took me and three teammates about four weeks to make, would today probably take me a week to do solo, if even that.

Looking back, I see plenty of faults in it, but I'm also proud of how far I've come in such a short time. This project was made a little under two years ago, and I'm excited to look back at my current projects one day and feel the same way.