Penguin Action Toolkit
Penguin Action Toolkit/Penguin ARPG Toolkit was a student pitch project, where we told the ETC that we wanted to create an accessible, extensible and powerful action game framework that helps small indie teams make action games and saves them valuable time in development.
My role: Technical Producer, Programmer
When we were pitching this project, I was researching existing toolkits on the marketplace and realized that most of them were closed systems with little to no room for customization (you can customize parameters, sure, but to integrate your own systems to the framework would be a nightmare), because toolkits were usually made to kill the programmers and to be used without writing your own code. This ensures easy to use, but users were not guaranteed to be making the game they wanted to make, since they were limited by the given functionalities.
We saw the gap in this market where no toolkit was extensible and powerful at the same time, with the drawback that you need to write some of your own code. As a result, we pitched Penguin Action Toolkit to be a toolkit for developers with some experience in Unity and C# to help them build a strong foundation or iterate/prototype rapidly.
You can find my pitch deck here.
Throughout the project, I defined the project’s life cycle, including roadmap, pipeline, internal & external testing protocols.
Internal testing suggests that we built game slices with our own toolkit for three purposes:
1. to make sure our documentation & tutorials are working
2. to see if every game developer's own creative idea can be made possible within the toolkit
3. to hunt bugs
I have made a prompt for this. Every one on the team submitted their demo. I made a hades shield variation.
External testing is more intuitive - we made this toolkit to be used, let's see what actual users think of it. However, it is easier said than done - we have managed to get people to go through our built-in tutorials and iterated a few rounds, getting people to build games is a very different conversation. It was challenging to ask people spend 10+ hours to help us make our package better, and we couldn't really get funding to frame it as paid research. Then I decided that we host a PAT game jam, hoping a more fun advertisement would attract actual users, and it did.
As of December 2024, we are published in Unity Asset Store. You can find out more about our process in our project website that I made.
