apathia_icon

Intended launch in Q3 2025 on the App Store

My involvement

I was a programmer on a team of 9 (other members being Jeremy Ku-Benjet, Vincent Jiang, David Kim, Andy Lasson, Alan Liu, Lorrin Li, Grace Myers, and Angela Zhu). George Zou did the music.

I was the primary team member responsible for programming game/turn resolution (the actual game logic of the board, units, and all their abilities), shaders, and the tutorial. I was also partially responsible for the design of unit abilities and many mechanics of the game (as well as pitching the idea in general).

This project was originally made for Cornell’s Advanced Game Design/Architecture course (which is specifically about mobile game development), and I would like to give a thanks to Walker White and the TAs for the course for their advice.

High Concept Statement

Every once in a while, the gods of the universe meet in a mysterious plane… to play board games. Maneuver your units across the board to defeat your immortal friend in a fast-paced strategy game!

Genre Details

Apathia is a mobile strategy game inspired by Clash Royale, UFO 50’s Attactics, and RTS games. The goal was to create a game with rich strategy and complexity while keeping the package friendly to new players and the mobile game form factor.

Gameplay Details

There are 8 playable units in Apathia that have unique abilities, animations, and stats. These are the Meep(s), the Mantis, the Horse, the Monk, the String, the Quatl, the Drup, and the Giant (in the rough order that we designed them). There are an additional 3 units which cannot be played alone and can only be spawned by others: the Hand (which the String turns into), the Egg (which the Quatl turns into), and the Powerup (which the Drup spawns). Currently, these units are grouped into pre-built decks/classes, but we are exploring letting the player pick whichever they desire to put in a deck.

Technical Details

Apathia was built using CUGL (Cornell University Game Library), a low-level game library built on top of SDL intended for use in 2d mobile game development. Other tools were used such as Procreate, Figma, and Logic.

If you would like to beta test the game (on iOS or Android), please send me an email.

Images

several_screenshots

deck_select tutorial

A screenshot from an early digital prototype (which I was responsible for making):

gameplay_prototype

An image from our nondigital prototype:

nondigital_prototype