Christian Licona
Tools and Gameplay Engineer

Deep Space Express

“A fast-paced cooperative 2D spaceship shooter using various animal characters to control stations in defense against attacking pirates.”

Deep Space Express | DigiPen Institute of Technology

Deep Space Express was developed as part of our Freshman year GAM150 course project at the DigiPen Institute of Technology. Our team consisted of 5 programmers, and I served as a Gameplay Programmer and Producer for our team.

I helped integrate game architecture designs we were learning in our classes alongside the project such as pseudo inheritance within the C programming language. I also helped develop the player controlled stations around the ship, and organized team meetings to make sure we were on track with finishing our game by the end of the semester.

I also made that trailer for our game! Making trailers is something I love volunteering for any chance I get for whatever project I’m working on. That trailer was shown in front of the whole school during the annual game showcase at the end of the year. It felt good hearing some chuckles in the crowd during the hectic moments in the trailer.

Writing a custom game engine in the C language can be difficult. In an attempt to make things easier for the team, I wrote a controller manager for us to interface with. The interface has a good amount of functionality, so I decided to create this document for my teammates in case they needed a quick reference to which functions to call.

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A set of 3 pages from the documentation PDF that are fanned out like 3 playing cards.

This is a “sell sheet” we created as part of the GAM150 project class. If I remember correctly, I made this in the Apple “Pages” app on my phone at the time.

A poster displaying images of the game and selling points about the games features. The poster is sectioned into 4 parts from top to bottom. The top section shows the logo of the game saying 'Deep Space Express' at the left, our team logo saying 'Light Point Games', and an image of the player space ship and 2 enemy space ships. The second section shows an image of gameplay to the left and 4 bullet points to the right saying: Bullet Hell Combat, Operable Stations, Grapple Hook!, and Waves of Pirates. The third section shows 3 bullet points to the left that say: 4 Player Co-op, Farm Animals, and Unlockable Skins. To the rigth is an image from the character select screen in the game. The last section shows the Team Roster: Jonathan Bourim, Jorge Fuentes, Dustin Keplinger, Christian Licona, and Jacob Presley. The the right is a parody drawing of an ESRB rating that says: A for Animals.
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