Parallax

An old-school platformer with the ability to move the player forward and backward to different layers of the game world. This game is a metroidvania with an emphasis on world exploration.

Spring 2012

Inspired by Fez, I developed a 2D platformer with 3D mechanics.

Summer 2012

I worked with students to develop a story and some art for the game. For a while we were calling it "Project Tophat".

2012/2013

I continue developing the game, adding game mechanics, a level editor, and an importer / exporter for PSD files, so levels can easily be blocked-out in Photoshop.

2014

I continued to work on the project for some time. However, Microsoft announced that it would no longer support XNA, and gradually progress on this project ceased.

Summer 2019

I finally ported the project over to MonoGame, and continued development for a few months. Inspired by Unity, I completely rewrote the engine to use an Entity-Component approach and I rebuilt the level editor to function more like Unity's. I added additional features to the game, like a 2D physics engine and polygon editing tools.

I have written all of the code on this project, and I've learned a ton. Back in 2012, I needed to create a custom multi-pass renderer for compositing the scene and allow scaling, tinting, and fading of "3D layers". When rewriting the engine and the level editor in 2019, I relied heavily on C#'s reflection library and on C# attributes.

DAGD students helped design some art and story elements in 2012. I developed the tech.