Mental Mage is a short game prototype I made in Construct3 with a small team. It’s an arcadey twin-stick shooter type game like Robotron, with the twist that you gain different attacks - spells - in between rounds, but (pulling from the DnD idea of spells slots and memorized magic) you can only hold so much in your mind. This is visualized as a grid akin to the NaviCust system in Mega Man Battle Network, where you place polyminos into it - however, the more you use a spell in a round, the larger it becomes in the grid, making it harder to fit other spells in. At the same time, though, that spell will deal more damage, causing you to have to decide between versatility and variety, or tunnel in on one powerful spell.

As mentioned, this was a team project. I worked with two other people to design and develop this game - my role in development was mainly programming the “inventory” portion of the game. We all came up with the concept together - I think I suggested the vague idea of “visualized spell slots” on a grid, and then the others added the idea of spells that grow in size if you use them too much, and we hashed out the specifics from there. A particular limitation with this project was that it was made with the free version of Construct3, which limits you to a certain number of events (the main building block of the engine). We were able to get the game to just fit within the maximum amount!