Category: Professional Projects

This was a filler project while other projects were tested for their market value. I worked on this for about 3-4 weeks only and the code reflected the tiem spent on it.

The most challenging part here was the AI setup for the game. As the entire fight was AI I had to make the logic for movement and attacking for both the player and enemy units. The movement proved to be a big pain as detecting if a unit was ahead of the unit moving was really trickey to nail down. I did eventually get it working with raycasting and a slight delay to the logic for each line by a frame.

Other than that the game went rather well. There were few bugs with the combat and the scene transitions etc. As this wqas just a prototype it only had 3 levels on loop so not the most complex of game to produce.

This was my first main project of the year. I worked with another programmer to produce the code side for the project with the art team working on all the visuals. I ended up programming most of the gameplay with the exception of the crypto market simulation & its UI. This included the:

• Tutorial System
• Dialogue System
• Workstations (Upgrades, Props, Eco Generation etc.)
• Economy System
• Enviroment Unlocking
• Idle Mechanics
• AI Navigation

By far one of the most challenging parts of this project was the tutorial. Making a tutorial system that is truely modular is surprisingly difficult. The solution I wrote for this version was pretty good but did have a few flaws, most notably the system for saving the last place the user was at as I used an int when it should’ve been a string. As the int setup meant if I moved bits around it could break the user’s progress through the tutorial as it would return them to a different step than the one they were on.

The project had a few bugs with it during development, but turned out pretty good. Running really well compared to some of my previous projects and is by far one of the best looking & running projects to date.

As this is a larger project than some of the others I have worked on, I was working with a consistent team of 3 with the occasional help from others when it was needed. Given I was the main dev on the project, the majority of the programming was on me as well as setting up the UI based on mockups provided. While most of the design & art was done by other team members. Though we often discussed the design of new features over with the team to make sure we were all happy with it.

My Contribution

Initially I started out working on this project as a side developer, working on some racing mini-games to compliment a more traditional merge game. However after a few months I ended up taking over the project in full and developing it into what it is now.

So this was my second fully solo project, I came up with the idea for this one as well, as well as a few other ideas that were set aside for another time. The elevator pitch is pretty much risk but with merging and that is pretty much what I made. I had the creative freedom to go with it how I wanted with a little basic design given to me to base the game off.

I based some of the design off the Lord of the Rings Battle For Middle Earth 2: War of the Ring game and Risk: Factions. The phases were setup to allow the player to go about their turn. I set the game into 3 phases per player per turn, which seemed common for games on the genre.

Planning Phase
This is where the players woudl gain their units for their current holdings (territory count and region bonuses). Merge their units to gain stronger units and add units to terriories they currently own ready for battle.

Battle Phase
This is where player can attack territories and manage units into conquered territories. Each battle lets the user either auto-roll the encounter until 1 player wins or by rolling each roll as you would do in the board game manually. Once the user has finished their attacks, they can move to the last phase.

Regroup Phase
This phase is optional and allows the user to move 1 group of units from 1 territoriy to a neighbouring territory.

This was my first fully solo project working at Fumb, I was given a short but simple breif to make a matching game where the user had to merge cards in order to complete the levels. The idea was somewhat based on an old card match game from the Mario series, but for the most part I had full control on how this project would end up. I made most of the game to follow Actions which made it really easy to follow the flow of the game and reduced the update calles needed. On top of that I also made some custom editors to make working with some of the scripts and scriptable objects a little easier which was well worth to time spent on it.

I chose to keep the art style nice a simple in order to make that side of the project easier, I did most of the art minus the card art itself. I had to do a little work with shader graph to make the a shader where I could have two sprites on a UI image to make them two sided for the front and back as well as having a cover image with an icon placed on top for the front face. A few online tutorials plus my own knowledge of shader graph made this not to challenging for once.

This was my first project as a proffesional game developer. The project was nothing too far out of my conform zone but I certained picked up a lot in this one project alone. Like with all projects at Fumb there was no “hard” deadline for the work but as I was on probabation one of the goals was to finish the Gunsmith code. Given that I finished it in 8 weeks meant that I was in the middle of my second or third project by the time I was off probabation, which I passed more or less flawlessly.

The artwork was made or adjusted by a co-worker for the UI and guns. Programming wise, this has been a nice challenge to make, getting the merge board to work was one of the most challenging sections as a lot of the game relies on it. Other challenges included optimisation of the game and idle calculations which sometimes made me want to bang my head on the table but after whiteboarding the problems out I was able to solve them successfully.

The game went through several UI overhauls which were a little annoying from the dev side, as updating the art in a game over and over is pretty time consuming. Though overall I’m pretty happy with how this turned out and it is still a solid product for my first peice of work in industry.