"My Little Pony: Mane Merge" was my very first commercial credit, and my first industry project. I worked on it at Gameloft Brisbane and it was made for/released on Apple Arcade.

During my time working on this project, it kickstarted my career in games. I started out fixing bugs, then moved quickly to supporting features, then to owning whole features' UI.

I am most proud of the infinite-mode feature I worked on, which showcases a tower of critters in the UI. I prepared fun animations of the critters stacking on top of each other, causing a rippling bounce animation down the tower and spawning cute particles. I was also responsible for advocating for, and preparing, several merge board item animations. This included converting merge items into currency items, and capsule opening animations.

I learned a lot about Unreal Engine here. I had never used Unreal Engine outside of the game jam that scored me this internship originally so I was basically as inexperienced with Unreal as you can be. However, this was a very successful first step in my career, proving to myself I can learn things very quickly and start influencing the project positively right away. I worked on this project for roughly a year - from just after a vertical-slice milestone, all-the-way through to the last game evolution (update 2) milestone!

Game Clips

Here are some clips from the development. I did not manage to save much content from it's development before we handed it off, so there's just a few interesting things I did.

Here's the 'paginator' I made for the main menu panels. It would, overtime, switch between different pages. This paginator was animated to show the pages switching with an extreme 'smear' effect. The animations were all handled programmatically, so they could work easily with the dots that I made dynamically populated from the data.

A prototype critter counter I made by repurposing textures already in the game. This was a concept for the 'saved critters' counter for infinite mode. It ended up as a much nicer critter tower I also developed.

Here's a prototype of a 3D-looking bubble material I made. We ultimately decided against it because it didn't fit the rest of the style or UI, but it was a learning experience for sure.