Aurora Esmeralda - Author - Aurora Esmeralda

Tavern Tangent: Wizard Warfare

auroraesmeralda@protonmail.com (Aurora Esmeralda) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +1000

This game was made in collaboration with Matthew Baird and Jessie Rachman.

You’ve been dying to get your hands on a new tome. Unfortunately, so have you opponents, so the only way to settle is an old fashioned wizard brawl.

All wizards cast a spell at another wizard simultaneously.

Fire Spell beats Wind Spell
Wind Spell beats Water Spell
Water Spell beats Fire Spell

A wizard who is hit with a spell which they don’t counter will be sent backwards, one step further away from the tome! Keep spellcasting until you are the last wizard standing.

Tavern Tussle

auroraesmeralda@protonmail.com (Aurora Esmeralda) — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +1000

Download Tavern Tussle on itch.io

This game was made in collaboration with Jessie Rachman, Matthew Baird, Ameen Alqudah, and Alexander Maturan. I designed and programmed all major foundational game systems, including player movement, game flow, minigame structure, and UI.

Tavern Tussle won the People’s Choice award at UTS Tech Fest 2026. Read more about that here.

Tavern Tangent: Drink Swindler

auroraesmeralda@protonmail.com (Aurora Esmeralda) — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +1000

This game was made in collaboration with Jessie Rachman. I was responsible for all programming besides NPC position tweening, and all UI implementation.

Protect and Swerve

auroraesmeralda@protonmail.com (Aurora Esmeralda) — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +1000

Download Protect and Swerve on itch.io

This game was made in collaboration with Jessie Rachman, Matthew Baird, Ameen Alqudah, and Alexander Maturan. I was responsible for the scrolling background and many of the gameplay mechanics.

Someone had the audacity to break the speed limit in your jurisdiction.

Unfortunately crime doesn’t sleep, but neither do you. With the body cam off, it’s time to put some of your unofficial procedures to good use.

Stuff It We Snowball (App Store release)

auroraesmeralda@protonmail.com (Aurora Esmeralda) — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +1000

Stuff It, We Snowball (App Store release) is available on the App Store for free, and ad-free, here. It evolved from the game jam version, which you can read about here.

In Stuff It, We Snowball, you race down a treacherous mountain, and picking up snow along the way. Each day features a new procedurally generated mountain to race down. Get enough stars to complete each day to bronze, silver, or gold.

Overshadowed

auroraesmeralda@protonmail.com (Aurora Esmeralda) — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +1000

Source Code on GitHub

I created Overshadowed (along with Harlen Postill, Alexander Maturan and Gordon Huang) for a Game Design course at university. I was primarily responsible for gameplay programming, as well as designing Level 3.

Overshadowed was featured at the UTS Student Games Showcase and won Best Game from Game Design Methodologies.

Technologies Used

Unity

Lessons

Puzzle Design. This wasn’t a discipline I had particularly experimented with before. There are countless things I learned from this — some of which I will discuss in later points — but an aspect which I struggled to accept was that I had to stop trying to show off to players. I’m writing particularly about the final puzzle of Level 3, which makes clever use of the glass mechanic, elevation, and blocks disrupting light flow. While these are all conceptually interesting ideas, users were consistently confused, and really struggled with this puzzle. What I should have done is rework it from the concept up, but I was so pleased with it that I just kept tweaking it, and ultimately, users never really got it.
Art Style. Effectively all of the (3D) art assets in this game are store-bought. I am very proud of the way we integrated them together, to form a cohesive and relatively unique visual identity. Ultimately, this was guided by the artistic vision we had — calm, minimal, similar to Monument Valley. This effect is achieved by two main things: shaders, and lighting. We performed colour-space quantisation on the full frame, which reduced the number of colours and helped create the minimal effect. The sky shader with stars both highlighted the minimalism of the level design, and provided a visual bridge between the hand-drawn style of the trailer, and the minimal 3D style of the game.
User Testing. This is by far the most important learning of this project. User testing is incredibly vital and there is no amount that is “too much”. There are countless things we changed as a result of user testing, the most important of which was the control scheme. Overshadowed is an isometric game, so choosing a control scheme presented a challenge. In testing, users chose screen-space coordinate controls and world-space coordinate controls at an approximately 50/50 rate. Ultimately, I created a system to automatically assign a control scheme to users based on their first second of inputs (unfortunately, by the time I had implemented it, I had run out of time to user test). It was a mixed success — it certainly helped some users, while choosing the wrong control scheme for others. Realistically, I think a better solution would be to explicitly prompt the user, but I (once again) got distracted trying to be clever, at the cost of the game. This project truly drummed the importance of user testing in my head, a mindset I have taken forward into my other projects.

All em dashes in this post were ethically sourced. No LLMs were used in the creation of these, nor any other punctuation marks.

Stuff It We Snowball (Game Jam version)

auroraesmeralda@protonmail.com (Aurora Esmeralda) — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +1000

Source Code on GitHub

Stuff It, We Snowball was made in 28 hours for the 2025 Tech Fest / Riot Games Game Jam, in which it won the theme for “most intuitive game”. The theme for the jam was “enlarge”.

The Hacking Minigame

auroraesmeralda@protonmail.com (Aurora Esmeralda) — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +1000

Source Code on GitHub

The Hacking Minigame was made for the Playmakers March Game Jam, in which it came 5th. The theme for the jam was “Restart”.

Technologies Used

Godot

Python

Git

Lessons

Game Design Scope. In previous game jams, my approach has been “what’s the most ambitious thing I think I can make within the time limit”. In contrast key success of The Hacking Minigame is it’s conceptual simplicity. Technically, the game is made up entirely of UI nodes. I had a basic implementation working within an hour of the game jam beginning. I’ve heard the adage that a game jam game should have one idea, and one hook (in this case, Cyberpunk 2077’s hacking minigame, but with multiple varying objectives), but I had never particularly applied it. However, I think that is a good framework for game jams.
Idea vs Execution. The quality of the idea is questionable, as I will discuss in the next point. However, I was surprised by the degree to which execution enhanced a somewhat conceptually flawed experience. The game’s constrained scope allowed me a lot of time to polish and refine the experience, adding elements like shaders, sounds, and the intro sequence. Users valued the level of polish to a degree which I found unexpected; it’s hard when programming games to view them from the user’s perspective. In future, I should focus more on polish.
User Investment Must Be Earned. Unlike me, users found the game difficult to get into. The elements I found satisfying — meticulously planning sequences to achieve the goal — users didn’t enjoy, because it required them to invest valuable brain power, investment that I had yet to earn. This meant a lot of users bounced off, or worse, selected options at random until they died. The game wasn’t overly hard, but it was overly tedious, and despite trying to mitigate this with the game doing all the maths calculations, it was ultimately too much. In a game jam context, less taxing is better, because user investment in your game is low.

All em dashes in this post were ethically sourced. No LLMs were used in the creation of these, nor any other punctuation marks.

Scale Ray Saga

auroraesmeralda@protonmail.com (Aurora Esmeralda) — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +1000

Source Code on GitHub

Scale Ray Saga was made for the 2024 GMTK Game Jam, by myself and betapop.

Technologies Used

Godot

Python

Git

Railway Racers

auroraesmeralda@protonmail.com (Aurora Esmeralda) — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +1000

Download links are available on the Railway Racers itch.io page

Source Code on GitHub

Railway Racers is a real-time train logistics puzzle game. Source code is available on GitHub — containing some of the worst code I’ve ever written. But, if for some reason, you feel compelled to investigate the secrets behind elusive functions, such as find_path_but_dont_let_the_stupid_train_do_a_180_and_combust() or _throw_that_pokeball_babyyyy() — or simply wish to observe my insanity growing as manifested in code comments, then you may peruse it at your wish.

Quantum Salvage

auroraesmeralda@protonmail.com (Aurora Esmeralda) — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +1000

Source Code on GitHub

Quantum Salvage is top-down space shooter, with spacecraft switching mechanics. You enter a battlefield as the weakest class of ships, but improve your flagship and grow your army, becoming a formidable force on the battlefield.