Ascend through the ranks of Babushka’s vampiric guild of demon slayers as you take revenge for her brutal demise. Eviscerate torsos, impale heads, and wield supernatural blood powers to vanquish the demons that killed your granny. Pay tribute to the almighty Babushka by unveiling masterpieces of blood and dismembered corpses. Splatter the walls sanguine and demonstrate your power as the last living descendant of the Dhampir lineage.

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A Demon Killed My Babushka is a first-person action game about a young demon slayer’s journey to avenge their Babushka. She was the matriarch of the demon-slaying guild in addition to being their actual grandmother, who perished brutally at the hands of the demons in a recent onslaught on a city loosely based on Petropavlovsk, a metropolitan center on the Kamchatka peninsula in Eastern Russia. What’s special about this guild of demon slayers is that they are made up of vampires and dhampirs (vampire-human hybrids) whose powers are fueled by the blood of the demons they target. Now as the successor to the guild’s perseverance, the young demon slayer must rise to the occasion, just as Babushka taught them, as the last line of defense against the impending global doom of the demon menace.

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As a developer heavy team we wanted to explore how we could push technical boundaries in different ways and saw the final Capstone year of the Game Design & Development MS program at the Rochester Institute of Technology as the perfect opportunity to challenge ourselves. Two main learning objectives came as a result of our aim for a high ambition. We wanted to create a standalone game experience on top of a proprietary game engine. However, these would not be two siloed parts of the project. The intention was to create an engine for the game experience, and the game experience would inform what would be required from the engine. They move forward hand in hand. 

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To ensure the engine and game experience would progress in parallel, we divided the developer resources of our larger team into smaller sub-teams that would focus on both facets of the project simultaneously. This would continue until the point where the engine could start servicing gameplay through the implementation of scripting layer that would connect gameplay logic to the core engine systems. This point symbolizes our main transition phase where the Unity prototype development team would move over to the engine completely to begin the process of porting gameplay logic to the new platform. Following the transition, developer support for the prototype would largely fall of with the exception of small fixes or tweaks to iterate on playtest feedback.

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As a part of a core team of five, I took up roles as a Project Manager and Gameplay Developer. In my role as a Project Manager, I oversaw, managed, and enacted our day to day process to ensure we were on track with our development objectives. As a gameplay developer I was primarily responsible for implementing the FPS controller and player mechanics in both the Unity prototype and custom engine as well as implementing proof of concept systems (such as applying blood decals to the environment from particles and core game objective logic) in the Unity prototype while the engine was ramping up to support gameplay.