Another project built as part of UC Berkeley’s Game Design course, Capitalize was created to focus on character design. The idea was to have the game’s main character—a lowercase ‘i’—reflect and represent the actual player on their quest to become a self-actualized capital ‘I” (is it really a student project without a thinly-veiled metaphor?).

The player would control the letter as they platformed through a half-written novel and collect words that described their pursuits. For example, the word ‘daring’ was only collected through a series of dangerous jumps over empty space. Ultimately, the words collected by the player would create a snapshot of the player’s archetype and be presented to them at the end of the game once they had successfully grown into a capital ‘I’. For this project, I contributed the engineering and design with Meena Vempaty providing the art. 

While the high concept seemed novel on paper—navigating a single letter through a written page to collect words that describe the player—the execution of a top-down platformer was much more challenging in practice. There’s a very clear reason no successful game has the player jump towards the camera.