C++/C# programmer
Developed in March 2021
I helped create this small game with a group of friends for the magical girl game jam. Although we weren't able to submit the game to that specific jam, we still spent just a single weekend on it and published it to itch.io as well.
Description:
Surf as far as possible and jump over obstacles to win the surfing contest! Jumping will earn you points but BEWARE! Betty speeds up a little each time she successfully lands a jump. Will you help her win the surfing contest?
Sped-up top-down view of the obstacles spawning, scrolling, and eventually despawning
In the real game, you only see a side-view of the water, so you never see the obstacles appear and disappear
My main contribution to this project was the infinite level scrolling. The camera never moves. Instead, the obstacles in the water move past the camera to create the illusion of movement. This makes it easy to spawn and despawn level chunks whenever they are needed.
I used Unreal Engine's level streaming system for this so that the level designer could easily create level chunks with only a few extra steps. After spawning the chunks, the individual objects all inherit from a class that moves along the Y-axis. The speed at which they all move depended on a separate global system. Once they hit a big trigger box far out of bounds, they are destroyed. Since all level chunks are the same size along the Y-axis, the spawning system just needs to check how far the last chunk has moved to know when to spawn the next one.
Besides the speed increasing every time the player jumps, there was another difficulty system that didn't make it into the game. All the level chunks were divided into several difficulty levels and I made a system that would make difficult chunks more likely to spawn over time. Sadly, this system didn't make it into the game because we didn't have time to create enough chunks to use it effectively.
I helped out with debugging the player movement, but I didn't implement it in its entirety.
The game is published on itch.io and can be downloaded there.
Project tags: #C++, #Game Jam, #Gameplay, #Multidisciplinary, #Prototyping, #Released, #UE4