Cory in the House was an adventure game, developed by Handheld Games and released by Disney Interactive on April 15th, 2008 for the Nintendo DS, based on the popular Disney Channel sitcom. My responsibilities were focused on gameplay and UI, including weapons, enemy behavior, scripted events, pop-up dialogs and the main menu.

This was a fun project to work on, even if the quality of the end product was exactly what one expects from licensed title on the DS. Development was more relaxed overall, largely due to being properly scoped, with a functional legacy code base to build upon. This was my first game that I could find on the shelves of GameStop, so it will always hold a special place in my heart.

After this, I did some additional programming for Cheetah Girls: Passport to Stardom, taking the pop-up menu from Cory and making it work for the dialog system in Cheetah Girls. This was only a month, so I am not giving it a full entry. But I did enjoy the opportunity to iterate over code I had worked on before, polishing, expanding and generalizing it so it could be a utility for multiple projects. With the tight schedule of most of the titles I worked on, this was a luxury I savored.

On a bizarre side note, in late 2013/early 2014, Cory in the House DS went viral as users and 4Chan and Reddit made it the most requested game on GameFaqs and gave it “universal acclaim” on MetaCritic user scores. Internet culture will never fully make sense to me, but it is nice that something I made was the source of some harmless fun. Could have been a lot worse.