Beyond the Marion is a 3D First Person walking simulator and puzzle game. In the game, you interact with your alien crewmates and repair your spaceship in order to escape a time loop – the bane of many space adventures. The game’s tongue-and-cheek dialogue and casual mechanics make it a short, fun, low-stress indie game experience.

While working on Beyond the Marion for Placebo Entertainment LLC, I served as a Gameplay and Systems Engineer, responsible for programming a wide variety of tools and mechanics to the specifications of the design team. Three of the many such tasks were: a robust inventory system, a designer-friendly minigame timer system, and integrating both to make a Save and Load system for the game. The minigame timers, a crucial element of the game’s time loop mechanic, were designed and developed by me for both designers and engineers, and it needed to be easy to understand with extremely low risk for user error. 

Working for Placebo Entertainment was excellent exposure to strict code standards, as well as both giving and receiving coherent, constructive, and timely peer reviews for programming tasks. I gained further technical experience in Object-Oriented-Programming and SOLID techniques, and I put design and work principles like agile development into practice. However, the most valuable skill I developed further at Placebo was asking questions – being inquisitive in a respectful and attentive manner allowed me to learn so much more than I anticipated and greatly accelerated the rate at which I was able to work.

I am incredibly thankful for the opportunity to work for Placebo Entertainment, and I am looking forward to the next opportunity!