Jared Nolen
Programmer • Developer • Game Designer • QA Tester
Queen of the Hill
Seven Person Team | Game Design Studio UCSC
November 2021
Queen of the Hill is an idle browser-based clicker game about growing your colony of ants to extreme proportions. Purchase upgrades in four different categories and advance your ant's developments in science, religion, and militarization. Take over the world with a supermassive ant colony!
On Itch.io here!
On GitHub here!
Responsibilities:
This was a team project for a class assignment over a two-week period. My responsibilities included:
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Gameplay Design and Ideation
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Upgrade Ideation and Balancing
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Upgrade Unlock System
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Upgrade Icon Art
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Upgrade Json File Creation
In collaboration with:
Milo Fisher: Programming, UI/UX Design
Paul Lee: Programming
Jalen Pastor: Programming, Game Balance
William Propp: Art
Alexis Sanchez: UI/UX Design
Alexander Shaham: Programming
Tools / Languages Used:
Javascript, HTML, VS Code, Aseprite
Design Process:
This game was made for the Game Design Studio class at UCSC. My team and I were tasked with creating a browser-based idle clicker game in javascript and HTML.
Our first step was to brainstorm some ideas on a theme for our game. Using Miro, we each wrote down some of the ideas we had and then voted on our favorite ideas. From there we further developed an idea about growing an ant farm. Once we had some ideas in place, we started to concept some layouts, mechanics, and upgrades that would be in the game. We then planned out what we would need to accomplish to finish the project and divided up the tasks.
One of the biggest challenges we faced was getting the values for the upgrades to feel balanced. We iterated on values and playtested it quite a few times until we were able to get to a spot that felt good.
