THE PACT
Platform- Windows, Itch.Io
May 2022-Present
Rogue-Like Game
Unreal Engine 5
This is a third-person magic shooter game.
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My Roles:
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Production
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Gameplay Programming
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Team-Liason
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Follow the game on:
Team Members and their Contributions:
David Liu (http://www.boningliu.com/)
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Gameplay, Narrative, and Level Design
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UI Design
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Technical Support
Jackson Shuminski (http://shuminski.com/)​
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Core gameplay programming
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Technical Design
Joel Shaji: https://joelshaji.com/
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AI design & programming
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Technical design
Kesavan Shanmugasundaram: https://www.artstation.com/kns8vfx
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VFX
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Environment art
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Lighting
As a Producer
Product Roadmap Planning using Jira Epics
Process - What? Why? How? Retrospection WHAT? Organized a Product Roadmap using the "Roadmap" feature in Jira. HOW? Categorized the Story Tasks cards to respective Epics. Strategically planned feature development and external artists' schedules WEEK BY WEEK for the entire two semesters. WHY? Performing such long-term planning helped us a lot with analyzing where the current development status and how much more we had to achieve. With a Core team of just five developers and a few external artists and the scope of development it was essential to plan out our features while finding the balance between priorities and new feature ideas with each sprint. Retrospection We did not onboard the external artists directly to the Jira roadmap, this was primarily handled by the Producer and presented to the team at the start and end of the sprint. Generally, on projects, I have one Product backlog and I make specific backlogs as they start. But this kind of planning sprint by sprint considering week-by-week progress made a difference for our team. We still kept our process open to changing priorities and reverting any ideas to the Product backlog. Most importantly it boosted confidence in our team by having such a roadmap that was highly visual and customizable.
User story process and granularity
Product Backlog and Scope Estimation using Jira
Semester-long planning with regular team, committee, internal testing, and code-freezes
Agenda Planning, Timeboxing discussions, and noting Minutes of meetings
Async Standups using Discord bots
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Worked with multiple external concept, Sound, and 3D artists.
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Overlooking Project documentation,
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Regular communication on discord is facilitated through categorized channels and threads.
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Organization of files and assets on Google Drive.
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Tools: Jira, Google Workspace
Individual Research on "Identifying methods of Conflict management and resolution in a Graduate Capstone"
Coming Soon...
Architected & Developed Character Attribute System
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A Base Character class is inherited by the Player Character and all the other Enemy Character classes in the game.
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The well-structured class hierarchies help in efficient interaction between health, and stamina for all the characters in the game.
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​Use of Blueprint Interfaces for handling Interaction and CharacterStats triggers.
As a Developer​
Developed the Rogue-like Game-Loop system
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The rebirth system onboard the player on each loop with a cinematic camera view and toggles the candles at the respawn altar to extinguish as per the Rebirth points.
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This system enables to have persistent data to be stored and used to retain Health attribute values and Rebirth Points.​
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Rebirth Points to the player make sure that they are reborn only for a limited amount of time.
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Developed Winstate, Rebirth state and Game Over state.
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Developed Player Ability Level Up system, which lets the player choose their own set of abilities throughout rogue-like game loops.
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Added an Asynchronous Loading Screen between level maps
Developed Lodestone Absorption System​
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The player can absorb lodestones when they defeat all the nearby enemies. Lodestone absorption happens with a cinematic camera blend.
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Absorbing a certain number of lodestones enables Player Ability Level Up.​
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An Ability selection UI pops up with random abilities. Players can choose any one ability from the two choices.
Developed a Tutorial Level System
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Implementation of a State-Machine to create a seamless flow through various stages of the tutorial to teach the player, the game mechanics incrementally.​
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The tutorial system, its states, and its order are highly customizable by the designer.
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The enemies states are spawned dynamically matching the player's transform.
Developed a Dynamic Dialogue System
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The Dialogue system works with a Dataset of 50+ dialogue sentences that can be customized by the designer using Unreal Datatable.
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It is highly customizable with nested dialogue layers including individual sentences, groups of sentences, random dialogue sets, and delays between dialogues.
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This dialogue system is linked to an event-based system which can be placed throughout the gameplay on important events by the designer and are triggered when the player experiences those events.
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Tools for Development: Jira, Unreal Engine 5, Perforce, Discord, and Google Workspace
Game Poster
