“Magatus” NHSGA Lightning Round Game

Magatus is a recreation of the classic arcade game Paperboy, made entirely in six days for the Lightning Round of the Carnegie Mellon University National High School Game Academy. It features the same gameplay as the original but with a brand new witchcraft theme. Magatus was made by a team of five, including Hao Lu Xia (artist), Ellis Miller (artist), Yizhi Chen (sound designer and producer), Nikolay Sitnikov (programmer), and myself (programmer). My biggest contributions were in the player-control script, including potion-throwing, collisions, and other core gameplay elements.

The Lightning Round is the first round of game production at NHSGA. After two weeks of learning from classes, it was my first chance to apply my new knowledge of the Unity game engine, and my level of skill exploded upwards. (My amount of sleep, on the other hand, plummeted.) I became very confident in my ability to develop video games, and this paved the way for my work on Clockwork Climb, my subject for the Original Game Round following the Lightning Round.