MIKHAIL STRUBLER

About Nodus
 
Nodus is the game my team and I developed for the DePaul Game Jam in 2016. I worked with Kevin Mester, Heather Layne, Jon Sayer, and Andrew Alfieri.

This game was created over the course of a weekend.
 
Nodus is Latin for strong bonds; we named it this because the game jam theme was family. We decided to take a more abstract approach and allow players to develop literal bonds with molecules in a floating space, but at the end, it's revealed that each bond is another friend and the letter that distinguishes each molecule is the initial of their first name. The player spends the time limit exploring the environment and creating new bonds. We designed the game to be fairly difficult to retain all your bonds to symbolize that keeping strong relationships is difficult and requires effort. At the end, when your friend's names are revealed, the names of those whose relationship died along the way are also displayed. 

I was the lead programmer and also heavily influenced the design of the game. I took a leadership role, directing my teammates, leading discussions on who needs to complete what tasks and I kept the scope of the project manageable. This project helped me learn many new tricks in Unity that I used to create the molecule objects and allow them to tether to each other and the player, creating an emergent tree of bonds that the player creates. This game proves my leadership and coding proficiency.