Natural Selection was a four person group project that spanned over ten weeks in Spring 2013.

The project was assigned in the class Game Software Design III. The project was to be written in C# and in Microsoft XNA 4.0. I elected to take on the role of core systems architect. Under that title, I was responsible for the loading in of graphical assets, collision detection, jump physics, AI triggers, and sound effects and music.

In Natural Selection you take on the roll of Darwin, a creature that can switch into three different forms, an evasion form, a speed form, and a might form.

"Ten weeks is less time, than you can possibly imagine"  

    - David Amata (Project Lead of Natural Selection)

David was spot on in the postmortem of Natural Selection. We were pressed for time up to the deadline. But it was still an amazing experience. Some responsibilities were dropped while others were added. It gave us necessary team work experience. 

In the end, the project had to be scoped down just so that it could be finished. But with loss of those planned features came the polished features in the game now. The features I spent most of the time on were AI patrolling, platform collisions, moving platforms, and the boss battle movements. 

One of my favorite features in Natural Selection is the boss battle. The boss battle was to feature 3 pairs of hands, all of which could only be defeated by switching to one of the three forms. I was given the task of starting the boss battle with the movements of his hands. After getting the movements down with moving boxes, we replaced the boxes with the graphical assets and put the boss finally in.