Charis Marangos

A stage-based, systemic, deductive puzzle game with handcrafted puzzles.

Control the trolls to defeat the evil gnomes.

This project is still a work in progress, but the core mechanics and most of the polishing are complete.

Technical highlights

Tight, sequence-based controls

• Custom motion system for chaining animations and gameplay events with zero garbage allocation
• Data-driven game logic, decoupled from Unity’s physics and colliders (e.g. validate level structure, not runtime collisions)
• Fluid animation chaining: fully tile-based logic that feels continuous and non-grid-bound
• Undo with rewind mechanics, integrated into core gameplay rather than bolted on

Built-in level editor (player-facing & production-used)

• The same editor used to build the shipped levels is available to players.
• Custom compact binary format for levels
• Custom windowing system built in uGUI
• Full quality-of-life feature set: undo/redo, clipboard operations, selection tools

Pixel art & rendering

• Pixel art created in Aseprite
• Python and Lua scripts for mass export and global palette replacement
• Advanced pixel alignment techniques, like pixel perfectness even at odd resolutions and intentional “cheating” during motion to preserve visual crispness

Auto-Reference Toolkit is an open source Unity Editor extension designed to simplify retrieving, validating, and assigning references to assets or components at edit time.

It works by applying getter and validator attributes to fields. For example:
[GetInChildren, Name(“Example”)]
public GameObject[] go;

This will automatically retrieve all child GameObjects matching the given name.

The toolkit includes multiple built in getter and validator attributes, with the option to easily implement custom ones. Additional hooks and APIs allow full control over how and when references are resolved.

All operations happen strictly at editor time, with no runtime overhead. Reference retrieval and validation can be triggered on demand, such as when saving a scene, before a build, or directly through the inspector.

Available under the MIT license at
https://www.twine.net/signin

We were tasked with creating a kid-friendly educational game about metal, covering mining, metallurgy, and their cultural significance. The project required two versions of the same game, one focused on Asgata (Cyprus) and copper, and another on Sifnos and silver.

I strongly believe that educational games should teach through play, and not feel like quizzes or disguised lessons. After extensive brainstorming, I designed the game as a classic point and click adventure. The player controls an alien robot that crash-lands in a mining region and must repair its spaceship by going through the full metallurgical process: mining, extraction, smelting, and shaping. Each version adapts the setting, visuals, and interactions to its local context, Asgata with copper and Sifnos with silver. Information about mining, metallurgy, and some of their cultural aspects is presented through short exposition and in-game interactions, without turning the experience into a lesson or quiz.

While this is not my most technically complex project, it is one I am particularly proud of due to its design clarity and execution.

Key technical challenges solved:

• Working within a very tight budget and deadline
• Dynamic localization system supporting custom grammar rules per language
• Single codebase support for gameplay and visual variations across the two regional versions
• A custom, robust sequence based system inspired by DOTween and specialized for point and click logic