FFA: Fantasy Fighter Arena

Disclaimer

Public media used, technical details from memory and shipped features.

About

Turn-based, real-time PvP strategy arena prototype for mobile where players assemble fantasy fighters and battle in short matches.

More Details from a blog by Tom Purdue, Game Designer
Link to APKCombo

My Works

• Turn Order UI: Built full turn-based sequence display for 6-character PvP (3 per player), sorting by innate speed (fastest top, slowest bottom). Added animated highlighter moving down list to show active character, plus click-to-view detailed panels (passives, attacks, health, speed).
• Character List: Implemented inventory screen anchoring player's selected 3 characters at top, with owned/unowned indicators for collection management.
• Match Entry & Setup: Created cinematic camera sequence post-matchmaking. Added strategic character placement phase with dark overlay hiding enemy side (revealing their 3-character team info).
• General UI Implementation: Delivered in-game menus/HUD integrating UI artist designs and designer flows. Collaborated with server engineers to hook client events to APIs (e.g. currencies, store).
• Victory/Defeat Screens: Designed endgame popups with reward breakdowns post-match.
• Internal Dev Tools: Extended debug overlay (Home key shortcut) with searchable/grouped command browser for designers and QA.

Challenges

Debug Command Browser

The debug overlay's command list grew large and unwieldy, making it hard for designers and QA to quickly find and execute the right commands during active development.

Approach

• Maintained a sorted list of command names. Implemented two-pointer prefix search to slice matching entries (e.g. first "a*" to first "b*" via binary search bounds) to show all the filtered entries.
• Added initiative-driven grouping, engineers tag new commands with categories (e.g. "Currency" → "AddCurrency", "RemoveCurrency", etc), enabling filtered browsing by logical buckets in the vertical-scroll UI.

Results

• Search + grouping dramatically cut lookup time. Earned frequent praise from designers/QA, even though no formal metrics were tracked.

Lessons & Future Improvements

• Could extend with fuzzy matching or command history autocomplete, and integrate runtime analytics to surface most used commands first.

Play Demo Video