During my second semester at FIEA, we formed a capstone team named Chonky Raccoon Studios and began working on a 2.5D action brawler game for PC, called Heart And Core, which is set be released on Steam in early August of 2023. The team comprised of 17 members, which was composed of programmers, technical designers, level designers, 3D modelers, animators, technical artists and project managers. We used Unreal Engine 5 for the development of this game.

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As a programmer on the team, some of my contributions towards the project included:-

• Prototyped and implemented gameplay mechanics using C++ and blueprints.

• Communicated with design team to understand and iterate on gameplay mechanics to improve them.

• Built a deterministic input replay tool which was used to collect input data from play sessions. This data could then be plugged back in to accurately recreate the play session by running the same code.

• Worked on a gravity gun system, similar to the one in half-life2, which can be used to grab any object and hurl it around the level using physics. 

• Ideated and implemented enemy AI using blackboards and behavior trees for 3 different enemy types.

• Profiled and improved performance to keep the game running at a desirable frame rate. This involved optimizing code, converting blueprints to C++ code etc.

• Fixed any bugs that came up during the development cycle.

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Working on such a large multi-disciplinary team gave me an insight as to how teams within larger development studios may function. We also used the Agile methodology during development, which involved sprint meetings, programming stand-ups, sprint reviews, team wide stand-ups and code reviews. This helped me become familiar with some of the practices used in the industry, and also helped me learn to use the JIRA software.