As part of updates 2.2 and 2.3 I contributed to various features in the game.
For update 2.2, my main focus was vehicle customization. As neither the engine nor the vehicle entities themselves were made with customization in mind I did a lot of digging in the engine to understand how we could achieve the result we wanted. In the end I had to do a lot of shader work and understand clearly how the shader system worked in the engine to achieve the desired results.
In update 2.3 my work mainly focused on the Autodrive feature to allow vehicles to move on their own while the player is riding them. With a world as large and complex as Night City, this required a deep understanding of the AI and traffic systems to modify what needed to be to make the ride feel as smooth and reliable as possible for the players.
During both updates, I also supported designers and artists whenever they needed engineering help to progress in their tasks.
I was part of the initial team for this project. Our main goal was to setup the ground work for this multiplayer game that had some challenging requirements regarding players ability and movements.
We did some extensive research and prototyping with Unreal Engine 5 to figure out the best way to build a solid foundation for the game. To keep the codebase reliable and easy to maintain, we made heavy use of the Gameplay Ability Syste to split abilities into clean, modular pieces while still keeping them highly interactive with each other and the environment.
We also had some challenging networking issues to face regarding character movements in a unusual environment so to get things behaving the way we needed I had to makes modifications to parts of the Character Movement Component’s networking code.
I was part of a mandate for Jagex where my main focus was expanding and improving the game’s combat system.
A good part of my work was on handling bows and projectiles netcode and combat animations replication. My number one priority during this mandate was making sure these features stayed reliable even under poor network conditions.
Aside from the gameplay side of this mandate I also assisted an animation developer to expend the existing animations and add new features like a control rig for better overall animation quality. My main role with these task being to assist him with the networking and replication side of thing.
This project taught me a lot of things about netcode, replication and Unreal’s animation system, especially when it comes to building a clean, functional animation graph.
Paleo Clash was my end-of-study project. We had almost a full year to refine our initial concept, build prototypes to make sure the core gameplay was actually fun, and deliver a polished vertical slice to present at the end of the year.
One of the biggest challenges came from the item system. Our characters could use a variety of items that interacted heavily with the course obstacles so getting all those interactions to feel good took a lot of iteration. Character movement also had to be extremely smooth since it’s a racing game and we had to do some optimization on the world streaming because our track ended up being pretty long.
We also had to solve a few local-multiplayer-specific problems, like designing a sound system that ensured each player could clearly hear the cues they needed without getting overwhelmed by everything happening on screen.
For our final project of the year, the RPG brought together students from almost every discipline at Isart. Since I was in a relatively big group we decided to develop an ambitious project aimed at an audience we weren’t used to working with: young children.
Throughout the project, I focused on implementing the game designers’s specifications for the combat system and contributed to integrating several core game systems including the dialogue system, progression tracking, and the in-game shop. For the more technically complex features such as the B-spline component of the combat system I transitioned from Blueprint to C++ to achieve better performance and flexibility.
This was a group project that I did together with around fifteen people in the middle of our second year at Isart Digital. Pintada is a 2D platformer created in collaboration with Music & Sound Designers and Game Artists, where the player controls a guinea fowl tagged on a wall.
During this project, in addition to developing the gameplay, I made sure the Game Artists’ needs were met for integrating their assets into Unity. I was also tasked to develop tools to make the level designers work easier. The project requirements also included a server to manage a leader-board, which I was responsible for setting up and that was done with nodeJS.
This project was started by a small group of first-year Isart students with the goal of releasing it on the Google Play Store and potentially the Apple Store. Development began in OpenFL, and I joined during the migration to Unity.
My role was to help port the game prototype to the new engine and continue development to prepare it for release. Aside from gameplay I primarily worked on the backend systems such as retention features like daily rewards and quests. I also handled the implementation of the Google Play Games Services, Unity IAP, and Unity Ads.