Pond Jumper

Pond Jumper is a Single Player First Person Action Puzzle Game where you Launch, Bounce, and Grapple your way to the end of levels. It is a capstone project that I worked on with my peers at Pratt Institute. As our team had four people, we all wore multiple hats while developing the game. This project was my first look on a larger scale into the Game Design Pipeline, as any projects I had worked on in the past were made within a a few days, to a few weeks at most. Pond Jumper taught me a lot about managing scope, maintaining clear communication regarding a project, and most importantly: teamwork!

I primarily worked on UI programming, sound design, and aided in project management for Pond Jumper. We ran into several issues while working on the game, such as planning for more than we could realistically achieve as a team of 4, and unclear role assignment. The latter issue lead to multiple people working on the same features, and we lost development time and work. As the acting Project Manager, it was my responsibility to try and resolve this situation to the best of my ability. My solution was to do an “organizational reshuffle” to more clearly define our roles and responsibilities. Along with this, I used conflict management skills to manage the frustrations that came along with lost time and work due to this issue. Despite this being a setback, we were able to create a MVP of Pond Jumper for our Portfolio Presentation. I have taken a lot of the Project Management skills that I learned during this project with me, more specifically, ensuring that all members of your team maintain clear communication. A lack of communication is one of the largest issues that teams face, and can be one of the biggest detriments to a projects progress.