Mathis Dinger
As third year student in game design, my skills and understanding of games has evolved a lot. I found an interest in Gameplay Programming as a primary focus for my career and my role in the project i already have worked in.
I'm the most interested when it comes to programming but I also work in other sectors of game design like 3D modeling, VFXs, animations, shaders and more!
I always find ways to reach my goal, that can be through either tedious work or through creative solutions but I never give up on something unless it's totally hopeless
What was my role in that project?
I was one of the two Gameplay Programmers in this school project. I implemented sounds and created the enemy behaviour and movemements.
I used the navmesh system to make our monster automatically go to specific points. This allowed us to have multiple states in which the baby could either chase the player or roam.
How can you directly control sound parameters using Raycasts?
On this project, we used the free software FMod to implement the sounds in our game. You can use scripts to control certain parameters directly like highpass filters.
By using raycast between sound sources and the player I managed to get a dynamic feedback on the distance and the obstacles between the player and the sound sources.
The more obstacles between the player and the sound the more the effect would be strong. The use of different position from which the raycast are launched allows for the rough simulation of the ears.
What would I change if I had to do everything again ?
Mostly think that the organisation and the way of coding that was used in this project was pretty bad so that would be the principal focus. Making script more loose between eachother using singleton and events as to alleviate ourselves from the hassle of empty serialize fields.
What were the biggest difficulties in making this game?
The first one was the fact that it was made by only myself. It required the creation of assets and programming of the whole game by myself.
The second one was the platform, Phaser, because it's a web based framework. So the whole of the programming was done through Javascript. The debugging was one of the hardest part because it's pretty rudimentary as you can see on the gif.
What are my roles in this project ?
As I explained in the "About Me" section, I can work in other specialty. In this project, I'm working on part of the programming, VFXs and animation. This is also due to the fact that we have 3 programmers in a team of 9 including me. This means that most of the time, I was not needed for this part of the project.
Here is one exemple of the work I did in animation for the project:
How can i mix programming with VFX?
For the project, we needed a VFX representing electricity as it is the core mechanic of our game. For this purpose, I used the Line Renderer. The Line Renderer works by inputing positions and the component automatically adds lines between them.
So I wrote a script that takes two positions and adds points between them. And I then added a random offset to the points and a curve to the line.
Finally I added a shader to make a bit more interesting.
