Work: Tool programmer, Gameplay programmer, Technical artist
---------------------------------------------------------------
Rainbound is a cinematic 2D-platformer that me and six of my fellow students started the summar of 2024 about a bird called Puddles, who falls out of his tree and has to survive and get back up above the clouds.
This game is soon on Steam!
We knew from the get-go that this project was going to be taxing on artist due to the fact that because of this I looked for ways to help them. I made many small things for example a parallax script for specific objects in the scene, making the camera shake with state driven camera etc. But one of the most helpful things was when it comes to lighting and procedural animations.
The main tool I made was to make natural looking movement without having to animate it by hand. I also made it able to play without having the game running to reduce the iteration time for our artists. I also made zones (the area between the differently colored triangles) to temporarily change the movement's behaviour. I also made a custom inspector to reduce the clutter.
I made a lot of tools beyond this one including a tool to interpolate lights to enhance the mood when entering darker areas, a tool to make text fade in and out and more.
One large focus on this game is the environment and the environmental storytelling and this is often the responsibility of the graphics part of the team, but I tried as a programmer to make the world more immersive to enhance this feeling too. One example of this is having realistic physics and this can be seen in the in the interactable water.
To make the water interactable I made a script that creates a rectangular mesh, that was split-up in multiple segments. Ever segment had a circler trigger on the surface that had a spring behaviour that I made on it. This spring behaviour detects if a player or other object makes contact with that segment and then applies a percentage of the velocity of the object to the segment. In addition to the individual segments I made a master script that manages all springs. This script is used to make segments transfer a part of their velocity to neighboring segments leading to the water making waves that slowly disappears if a objects falls in the water.
The main issue with the water is that if you have large number of segments to make the water look smooth. To make it more performant I am currently working on making all the calculations in a compute shader instead.
I was responsible for the players movement in this game and this grew quickly complex as I worked with our two designers who wanted to try different movement sets for the player, adding, removing and modifying different abilities for example at least 6 different dashes, 8 glide abilities etc. This led to me making quick changes over and over again, this made the code very tangled and hard to work with. If I could make this script from the ground again I would make this a Hierarchical State Machine instead making it way more easy to add, remove and modify specific behaviours in the movement.
