The Great Strawberry Heist
~Programming lead~
Spring 2025
Unity 2D
System
Architecture
The Great Strawberry Heist is an 2D vertical platforming experience built to be played on an arcade cabinet and was shown at Bradley’s FUSE Exhibition 2025. Team Hungry Hamsters was made up of 18 students, freshman through juniors, who developed the game over the course of 4 months.
In this experience, you play as a hamster who must navigate through a variety of platforms and hazards inside of a 5-tiered cake in order to make it to the top and claim the strawberry topper. One of the hazards is the birthday cat, Domino, who knocks tiers from the cake and splotches of icing at the hamster. The game also includes a live leaderboard that updates as new scores are achieved.
This experience was awarded the Galactic Excellence Award by VIPs from Undead Labs.
As the lead of the programming team, my responsibilities included managing the tasks, performing code reviews, and structuring the architecture of our code and game systems.
Every week I met with the other leads and compiled a list of programming tasks. Keeping scope in mind, I created tickets in Jira and assigned them to my team. Throughout the week I held stand-ups to evaluate progress and blockers.
I evaluated every task based on functionality and adherence to the style guide. I emphasized polish from the beginning and had designers provide further feedback on our implementations to ensure the best possible end product.
I worked with the programmers on the team to talk through how we wanted to code each feature based on any dependencies or requirements. The goal was to create maintainable and event-driven systems to flexibly adjust to any changes requested by designers.
As an Engineer on the team, my main task was to build the tier swiping and timer systems but I also took on a lot of the smaller polish tasks as my time was divided between lead and engineer responsibilities.
When the player’s time on a given tier runs out before jumping into the next tier, that tier is knocked off the cake by the cat antagonist, and the player is “swiped” into the next level.
The Tier Swiping System is based on a series of events called by various other systems. There are actions for swiping the current tier, skipping to the next tier, and starting the end sequence. The tier manager has a reference to the 6 tiers and calls functions on them such as shaking the camera, getting the spawn point, swiping the tier, cancelling a tier swipe, and disabling a tier’s trapdoor.
​The Timer System is based on a few coroutines and events. There is a coroutine that plays during the intro sequence, one that plays every time a new tier is started, and one that interrupts the current timer when the player makes it to the next tier on time. There are events for when the intro cutscene is skipped and completed, and this system also uses the events from the Tier Manager. The timers are editable and flexible to make testing more efficient.
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