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Spotlight Showdown

In 2026, I was brought onto the team for Spotlight Showdown, a rhythm action fighting game for Global Game Jam. For the 48-hour jam, I was responsible for the main rhythm mechanic the game uses for most of the actions. We won Best Overall at our location, moving on to compete in the Best in Georgia 2026 competion where I was moved primarily onto UI programming. We won Best in Georgia and now we are working to fully finish the game to release on Steam.

Role Gameplay/UI Programmer
Team Size 15 Developers
Duration 2 Months (Ongoing)
Engine/Tools Unity / C#

Multiplayer Initialization

To set up local multiplayer, I used Unity's Player Input Manager component to spawn prefabs containing a custom configuration class. This class caches the active PlayerInput component, the designated character Scriptable Object, and the user's index within a manager marked with DontDestroyOnLoad. When a match starts, the system spawns character models at designated spawn points and links the internal variables directly to control events on the PlayerInput component.


Grab Mechanic

I was responsible for implement a grab mechanic on top of our existing move system. Our system gives each move its own flag and has fields to use hitboxes and hurtboxes. I added a grab input in the input actions and assign players a grab hitbox, setting it up so it's behavior was in line with the game's game design document.


Main Menu & Character Select

For the beginning menus, I implemented an additive scene loading system to preserve the shared environment backdrop across menu transitions. The background environment listens for character-selection events to trigger its animation. The system also auto-detects connected hardware, showing the player designations with the input device type, using this info to dynamically initialize the character select screen.

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