Gameplay Programmer
About the project
As a night watchman in an amusement park, you protect the rides from aggressive animals using mystical weapons, provided by a fortune wheel.
These weapons include options such as a French Fries Assault Rifle or a Lollipop Shotgun.
Project Specifics
Team size: 7 people
Project Time: SEP 2023 - JAN 2024
​My Roles: Game Programmer, Vision Keeper, Project Manager
​Tools: Unity, Rider, Google Sheets/Docs
First prototype & evaluation
I started to prototype things like the weapons, the inventory and the save and load system because we focused on a high level of replay ability (weapons can be different from run to run and are like collectibles) and with the safe system we can preserve player progress.
Physics
Knockback is one of the many unique features that differentiate the weapons from each other. With scriptable objects, I can store all the information, which allows me to make each weapon feel unique.
Animation
I animated everything from a shutter in the main menu with animation curves to the recoil of the weapons to have a high level of polish and make the game feel vivid while having responsive feedback for the player.
Save and load
I designed the system to behave like a 'string of pearls'. The game saves when important tasks are completed.
This works well in this scenario because the fights are the important tasks and they are linear. Making the system more advanced would be unnecessary and take up more time than necessary.
Flyweight
Observer
Singleton
Programming Pattern
It's important to me to improve in every way I can, and programming patterns helped me get to the next step. I used observers for things like controls to call methods only when needed instead of checking every frame. Singleton for my player and manager to get more flexibility. Flyweight & scriptable objects to handle the unique weapon logic where I needed stats for each weapon, which helped with clearance of code.
Me
My teamwork
It was great, our communication was one of the best things about us. I always made sure that everyone knew what was going on, who was working on what, and that everyone got help when they needed it. I found out that I had a good sense of time management and project management in general, helping me getting things done and keeping over scope away.
conclusion
"Work cannot be added without eventually splitting the desired result."
~ me
​
I was a vision keeper, project manager, and programmer which was a lot of work. To get it all done, I had to focus on the big picture of the project and only spend time on details when the time was there.