Braze - Unity Game

Braze is a short 2D platformer about the emotional cycle of creative block. Across four levels, the game explores anxiety, burnout, perfectionism, and imposter syndrome. Instead of explaining those feelings through exposition, we used atmosphere, movement, obstacles, and color to make each stage feel different to play.

I created Braze with Jake Crock over four weeks as our final school project. Jake led the illustration, character design, animation, level art, and broader visual direction. I led the game development and Unity implementation, while contributing to the game design, UX, research, storyboarding, and art direction. It was my first time building a complete game, so I had to learn Unity and C# while simultaneously designing, testing, and shipping the experience.

The development process involved constant back-and-forth between learning and implementation. I would research how a system worked, build an initial version, run into a new problem, and return to the documentation or code to understand what had gone wrong. Early roadblocks could take hours to solve, but each one helped me understand Unity more deeply. As the project progressed, I became faster at diagnosing problems, writing scripts, connecting systems, and translating our ideas into working gameplay.

Each level represented a different stage of creative block and used its own palette, scenery, pacing, and obstacles. The environments gradually developed from muted and desaturated spaces into more colorful and expressive worlds, creating a visual progression alongside the player. Jake developed the artwork and animation for the character and environments, while I translated those assets into playable levels and determined how movement, collision, triggers, and pacing would support each stage.

Building the game meant learning the full structure of 2D development in Unity. I created the player-movement system, implemented sprinting, jumping, falling, wall sliding, and wall jumping, and added coyote time, a short grace period that allows players to jump just after leaving a platform. I also worked with tilemaps, Unity layers, custom hitboxes, checkpoints, dialogue triggers, scene transitions, particle effects, animation states, parallax backgrounds, and death-and-restart behavior. These systems needed to work together across four visually and mechanically distinct levels.

Movement became one of the most important parts of the experience. Small timing changes could determine whether the game felt responsive or frustrating, especially during wall jumps and more precise platforming sections. We repeatedly adjusted acceleration, jump timing, collision boundaries, and animation transitions so the controls remained challenging without working against the player.

The most unexpected response came when a player began speedrunning the game. Someone I'd never met created a dedicated Speedrun.com page, submitted recorded attempts, and competed across full-game and individual-level categories. Seeing strangers play our student project was happily unexpected.

Braze took me from learning the Unity interface to shipping and supporting a complete playable game in four weeks. The project taught me that game feel is created through dozens of small, interconnected decisions, from the length of a jump window to the placement of a trigger or the shape of a hitbox. It also gave me experience working across design and development, translating an emotional concept into a system someone could actively explore.