Posts

Hands

  Hands - an unreleased multiplayer movement sandbox So what exactly is it? The concept is a pretty simple (though unique) one - rather than having a whole humanoid body to run around the world like most VR games, you are a hand. The game uses the hand tracking functionality of the meta quest to use your hand's movement to control your hand in game (I feel like I might end up saying hand a lot in this post...). You can scuttle along the ground like a crab, slap the ground to jump and make gestures with your fingers to the other players. The game provided a playground with a number of toys available, such as trampolines and jetpacks, and was planned to release with a tag game mode (though another football game mode was also finished). The 30s teaser trailer below shows the tag game mode, the movement (both jumping and crawling), the playground and some of the various customizations. In my time with the game I worked on a number of the features, as well as general bug fixing and impr...
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Frenzies: Progression

 The background: Frenzies is an online multiplayer shooter, and one of the things we realised we needed to have was a progression system, to drive retention and give goals for the players to work towards. Near Light has a custom backend which was being developed at the time, so my task was to work with the backend engineer to support the client/gameplay server side, as well as to tie into the gameplay/UI. Here's a marketing TikTok about the feature: Key features of the progression system: Backend communication. The information about levels, xp and so on are passed to and from the backend using a JSON schema to define the messages. This schema needed to be implemented in C++ to handle the data so it can be converted to and from JSON. Conveniently, the Unreal FJsonObjectConverter class has functions for converting between JSON and UStructs, so what was required here was implementing the schema in the correct UStructs, simple enough. Slightly less simple was controlling when messages ...
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Frenzies: The Objective Actor

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   Frenzies: The Objective Actor The Background: So for the first post on Frenzies, I'm choosing one of the first major systems I created as part of Frenzies, which has held up the gameplay since. So what is it? Well, the gameplay in Frenzies consists of multiple different rounds. Some of these rounds are your regular shooter fare (like free for all or team death match), but there are also some rounds unique to Frenzies, like Glitter Pig, a round where you chase a pig around the map, and Push (called Button Bash in game), a round where you need to get to the opponent's side of the map and press a button. (You can see some of the round types shown off in the Frenzies trailer:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a7ZyC51foY )  Some of these different rounds will have different victory conditions, different round lengths, different team requirements and even variations in the levels needed to support them. They may even have mid-round gameplay behaviour, for example in Red...
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Three years later...

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  Hi, it's been a while... So what's new? Well, for the past three years, I've been employed as part of the Near Light studio at nDreams. I've really enjoyed being part of the team and making some incredible games (more on those later).  Unfortunately, I've been informed that my role is at risk in a proposal for studio closure, so now seems like a good time to update you on what I've been doing during my time at the company. I might also have a few more personal projects coming to depending on how things work out, and I'll be posting about some of the specific features I've worked on in the coming days. But for now, I'd like to introduce you to the games I've been working on! Frenzies: Frenzies is the game I was hired to work on originally. I joined the project as a junior coder soon after it started, when it was still using the Unreal Lyra default models and had only example maps. I worked on the game until it was released to the public in Octob...
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Minigame Monday: Getting It Back

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  Getting it back: The concept: I returned to Unreal for this one; I decided I wanted to use the engine before I decided on the concept, but I soon came up with the idea of doing a volleyball game. This gave me the chance to experiment and practice a bit more with physics in unreal, and manipulating objects as desired. Unlike previous games in Unreal, I didn't tie myself to using C++ or blueprints, and instead decided to just use what made the most sense to me at the time. Suprisingly, I ended up using blueprints a lot more than I expected, I think because some of the logic behind them was starting to click with me, and I understood more that I could consider blueprint hierachy the same way as hierachy in C++. The challenge:  The first thing I looked at for this game was the physics, and making the ball feel the right amount of floaty so that it was possible to hit back, but also allow it to fly at a decent speed so that the player could add a decent amount of force to it. I p...
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Armageddump: Game Design

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 Armageddump: Game Design (The main post about this game can be found here) The context:  When I joined the team for this jam, it was very much as a programmer. I was suprised to find myself in quite a large team, although that was explained somewhat because the discord was a team that had done a number of previous jams together, and people would either take part in a jam or sit it out, either completely or only offering advice. The work for this jam was also quite split; there were a lot of artists and composers for instance, but each only created assets for one boss or so, meaning it roughly equated to fewer people putting more time in. After the jam started and the theme was announced, some of the ideas were amalgomated into the concept for our game. The project manager wrote a rough description of the bosses, with some attacks outlined but little more detail than that. To flesh out the game enough to start programming, a designer was invited to the project, but the concept...
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Minigame Monday: Covert Behaviour

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  Covert behaviour: The concept: I've been doing some studies into behaviour trees in Unity for one of my personal projects, so I figured I'd experiment with the framework I'd created (using this tutorial as a guide (I did notice that the GetData and ClearData functions seem to doing unneeded work - they call the parent function, which then calls its parent function and so on recursivly, however they also loop upwards individually in the original function, so it seems like the functions might be being called multiple times on nodes close to the root. I rewrote the functions for now, and I'll look into it more as I use data in the BT. (P.S sorry for the nested brackets, but I guess I am an programmer :P))). I decided to make a stealth game, where enemy behaviour was controlled by a behaviour tree. Enemies would patrol, and charge at the player if the player crossed their line of sight. On top of that, I added a panic mechanic; if the player reached certain spots, all th...
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