Working with Mighty Kingdom

This was my first opportunity to work in the Game Development Industry. Just after graduating from AIE Institute - Adelaide Campus in 2016, I was fortunate to gain contract employment and later fulltime permanent employment working with Mighty Kingdom.

During my contract I worked on an already released game called Shopkins: Shoppie Dash. My responsibilities involved troubleshooting, testing, bug fixing, and build deployment. This was my introduction to how Mighty Kingdom delivered games. The game was developed in Unity Engine and programmed with C# and was published to iOS and Android.

In January 2017, I was employed on a full time contract with Mighty Kingdom. I joined a team that were developing another Shopkins project called Shopkins: Chef Club, a match 3 game where you collected points for matching Shopkins that fell in to a cereal bowl.

After this, I moved on to a project called Shopkins World which was an assortment of Mini Games based in the town of Shopville. I was involved in the revamp of the game when it moved from a single street of mini games to an overworld with many streets to visit and find games in. This is the project were I got to make my first professional (mini) game; World Vacation. In this game, you control a small airplane called Jess Jet and avoid clouds while you pick up tickets, aiming for a highscore. It was a simple game but was fun and enjoyable to make.

I later moved to a project called Shopkins: Cutie Cars. Cutie Cars was an endless pacman like game, were you drove around avoid other cars and picking up item and power up to help you along the way.

Next I helped to develop Shopkins Dash, a frogger like game where you avoided shopkins as you moved up the screen. Based on the original Shoppie Dash I was more of an expansion an existing product.

Following this I start working on a project called WildLife: Puzzle Story a bubble shooter with an overworld similar to Gardenscapes. This project was one of the first where i got to start working on the project in early development. It was great to be involved with how thing were put together. The lead programmer on this project taught me a lot, and much of these teaching still guide me today.

One of the possibly longest projects I had the pleasure of working on was Kitty Keeper: Cat Collector. This was a cat collector game where you slowly rebuilt a mansion, making more room for there ever increasing collection of cats and furniture for them to play on. I worked with some great programmers on this project as well, one of which I found to be a great mentor who had a lot of faith in my ability and support my growth as a programmer.

I moved on to Ava’s Manor: A Solitaire Story for a short time, where I assisted with live ops, helping with bugs and new features. The narrative storytelling of this game is immense. Another enjoyable project to work on. It was around this time I was also given the opportunity to become a Mentor for a graduate programmer which was a great experience which I hope to repeat in the future.

The next project I moved on to was Funcom’s Conan Chop Chop. Easily the most fun project I had the opportunity to work on to date. I was involved with bug fixing and optimization. It was the first Cross Platform Multiplayer project I had the chance to work on, and gave me some great challenges to work through and learn from.

The next project I worked on was a partnered project between Mighty Kingdom and East Side Games. The game called Star Trek: Lower Decks: The Badgey Directive. We used to the East Side Games IdleKit to develop the Idle Game, I became in in-house expert for our implementation of IdleKit. This project presented me with further opportunities expanding my programming skills and develop more gameplay features within the game. I worked across many disciplines to help provide everyone with the features they required as part of this game. My time on this project gave me an opportunity to become the Technical Lead on the next project I worked on.

Power Rangers: Mighty Force was the next game I was able to work on. As the Technical Lead on this project I was able to lead our technical team and multi-discipline squads to produce an amazing game. Leadership presented a number of challenges and opportunities for me to learn about leadership responsibilities and help to guide the project to release.

On May 10, 2024 I was made redundant from Mighty Kingdom. I and many great developers left the company at this time.