These are non-commercial games I worked on with other volunteers from Home GameDev online club. They were all conceived, pitched, organized, worked on, and finished in a team environment with a specific planned deadline.
Operation Lifeline was a couch co-op game with spaceships, which includes two of the most fascinating things in gamedev. My contributions here were mostly in terms of physics tuning and lighting.
When different ideas got bounced around in our chats, I made a "workshop" scene that randomly made levels based on several controls so that the team could test out various design options, such as how physics should work, how quickly things should happen, how the controls should respond, how large the levels should be, etc., Every time someone had a new design idea in the chat, I updated the workshop.
I also helped with setting up the levels, the transitions between scenes, and fleshing out the game's story.
This was my first real delve into AI. I became obsessed with trying to iimprove the AI of the game and while most of those improvements would not bear fruit, one of them was ideal for the last "obstacle course" where our racing AI would not work. My biggest take away from working on Wrecking Cloud Derby was the realization that having lots of systems to choose from to solve particular problems is better than trying to pigeonhole all of the problems into one dynamic super-system. This was also my first game working in a team environment, which was far outside my usual comfort zone.
Kornel presented us with a fun prototype and a strong vision for Whisperdrift right from the start with his three design pillars, and I learned a lot from him. He and I went back and forth on the dynamic camera controls and some of the particle effects quite a bit as we fleshed out some of the "whimsical" polish on the game. I handled the appearance and programming behavior of the collectible fairies (which I call whispers) and made a new enemy type (dark whispers) that Kornel was able to spice up the later levels with.
Umbra Shift started as a squad strategy game inspired by Shadowrun Returns. About half way through the project's development, Jeremy had to resign as team lead for work-related reasons and asked me to take over. After a few days of nervous hesitation, I made a decision, which I'm still not sure was the right call or not, to completely rebuild the existing code-base. My programming skills were limited at the time, and I wasn't confident about reading and modifying a large amount of someone else's code. Restarting meant we were effectively cutting half our development time so a new schedule had to be made and we were re-evaluating it every week. There was a lot of confusion early on because we had two separate versions of the game being developed until the new code base was ready. With a new code base I was intimately familiar with, I was able to experiment and put in some features including a grid-based movement system with way-point planning, a contextually changing UI, turn-based combat, LOS and cover, a chat-dialogue system, and others. While the end-result was a much smaller game than we originally intended and many features were cut, I think the whole team was quite pleased at how it turned out. I feel like Umbra Shift was a huge boost in my programming skills, as it involved me constantly taking on challenges unlike any I had ever tried before because I didn't want to let down the team, who was so supportive, amazing, and really brought the world of Umbra Shift to life.
