During my freshman year at San Jose State University, I had the opportunity to be a contractor building mobile games for a now-defunkt company called Rikoshe Games, Inc.

I produced games for Rikoshe with my friend and mentor, Arthur Baney, using Game Maker Studio's scripts powered through the Game Maker Language, or GML. Arthur was a sophomore at SJSU, a member of the Game Development Club, and a talented developer - especially when it came to using GML.

Throughout my summer between freshman and sophomore year, I produced a handful of titles for Rikoshe games. Each game was required to follow a few rules. The game must be primarily skill-based, with as few luck factors as possible. The game must use an ascending score. The game must be generally playable within a 1-5 minute period.

Given these rules, my partner and I produced our first game called "Connect The Bots". In this game, a factory line of robots passes by at increasing speeds. It is your job as a factory worker to drag the appropriate parts for each robot into place before it reaches the end of the line. Mess up three times, and production is unrecoverable!

This game was a pleasure to make, and we had the pleasure of working with a talented artist to produce our assets. I loved the assets so much, I requested to use them on one of my first business cards.

For our second game, we produced an isometric puzzle game during a weekend-long game jam. In this game, your goal is to strategically move a dinosaur and a shark between the land and the water, respectively, so that they can meet somewhere and high-five. We got second place, mostly due to a lack of qualified participants.

For our third game, we made something we called, "Rap-I-Tap". Looking back, I don't think the concept is very original. A certain amount of balls start blue, and a certain amount start green. You must keep track of the green balls as they turn blue. When the timer stops, locate all the blue balls that were once green.

For our final game together, we produced a math-focused skill game I titled, while in the shower, "Orcana". Orcana does not actually mean anything.

In Orcana, the player starts with a score of zero, and an active value of 50. Bubbles will begin to drop from the top of the screen, and each bubble contains either a number or an operation. Once a bubble is popped, the value inside it must be used before another bubble of the same type. Once both types of bubbles have been popped, the player's active value is modified by the given operation with the equation "ActiveValue (Operation) SelectedValue". If the new active value is less than or equal to zero, or greater than or equal to 100, then the player loses. In addition to all of this math, a timer is rapidly decreasing, and doing an equation rewards the player with a small increase to their timer.

The games I created at Rikoshe taught me a lot about working with companies, working with others, and working on game development in general.

If you compile those games, let me know how you enjoyed the music.

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