Bringing a schoolyard world to life through art and interactive design.
Course Project · Video Games: Coding and Narrative · Macalester College · 2024
Game Design · 2D Illustration · Unity · C# · Gameplay Programming
Ruler of the Grounds is a short game about navigating the social world of elementary-school recess. Playing as a new student at Westwood Elementary, you must practice different skills via five mini-games to challenge the bullies who rule each playground structure and battle over their domains.
Working in a team of four, I contributed to gameplay design, visual development, and programming. I created the environment art and nearly all non-character visual assets, helped shape the game's minigames and progression, built reusable Unity prefabs, and programmed gameplay and navigation systems.
I helped shape how players progress through Ruler of the Grounds, from deciding what each of the five mini-games would involve to connecting each one to a specific grade or skill. These connections determined how players prepared to challenge the bullies who controlled different playground structures.
The goal was to make the mini-games, grades, and bully encounters feel like parts of one experience rather than separate activities. Each challenge gave the player a way to practice a skill and use it to progress through the schoolyard.
I created the environment art and nearly all of the game's non-character visual assets, including backgrounds, buttons, icons, interactive objects, and sprite sheets. Together, these elements established the game's visual identity and brought its schoolyard setting to life.
I also created visual assets for all five mini-games, adapting the artwork to each activity while keeping it part of the same game world.
With multiple team members contributing code, I created reusable Unity prefabs to streamline development and keep recurring elements consistent across the game. These shared components made it easier to build scenes without recreating the same elements from scratch.
My prefabs included buttons used throughout the game, mini-game instruction screens, ending modals, and dialogue box displays.
I programmed the math minigame and the navigation system connecting the game's different screens and activities. I linked the animated buttons in the classroom and playground to their corresponding minigames and bully battles, helping players move through the game world.
I also created and maintained the help and credits pages, along with the notebook where players could check their grades and view their collected stickers.
