mia makes worlds

Tag: engineer

  • Escape Hack [WIP]

    Escape Hack [WIP]

    Escape Hack (project codename) is a personal game project that I started as a type of ‘self-enforced’ game jam, intending to take a prototype to Develop Brighton to put into the hands of players and other developers and learn from their feedback.

    Clear Constraints

    When working on a personal project, it can be easy to plan a project that is too big or immediately start creeping scope. To combat this, I gave myself a series of helpful constraints:

    • Steam Deck first – so that I can take the game to Develop and give it to people to play on the spot.
    • Single player only – so that I do not need to gather groups to play together.
    • 5-10 minute core game loop – so that a busy, tired conference-goer can enjoy the game and ‘get it’ as quickly as possible.

    Design

    Player Goal

    The game sees the player trying to escape a dangerous underground facility. They must ascend floor after floor, all while being pursued by a strange artificial creature.

    In each room, the player can choose when to raise the tension: they cannot leave until they activate power in the room, but doing so allows the creature to enter the space and hunt them.

    Gameplay Verbs

    To escape and outsmart their hunter, the player must master the game’s systemic nature by hacking the technology to create new pathways, distract the artificial creature, and ultimately fight back.

    As the player progresses, they discover new hacking programs to aid their escape. Eventually, they’ll discover they can evolve and combine these programs to create new ones, further enhancing their abilities.

    Light Narrative

    The game is set in the SIGIL universe, using the world-building I have done for that project to ground it and provide context.

    A goal of the game is to gradually show the player that the threat of the artificial creature is not malicious, but instead comes from its desire to keep you within the facility, perhaps because of its own deeper emotions towards you.

    Technical Structure

    When working on small and quick projects, I like to focus heavily on code reusability and keep components as small and simple as possible.

    Leaning into Unity’s preference for composition helps greatly with this, as it allows you to quickly test new gameplay behaviour by combining small monobehaviours like ‘LEGO bricks’. Breaking down objects into their smallest possible parts also has the bonus of making systemic behaviour easier to implement later on in development.

    Contracts between interchangeable components can be handled using UnityEvents rather than Interfaces, which can slow development due to the need to plan class inheritance.

    For gameplay objects such as abilities and items, ScriptableObjects prove very useful, allowing for a lightweight ‘content management system’ where names, descriptions, properties, and behaviour can be designed and then utilised by gameplay monobehaviours.

  • Battlefield V: Firestorm

    Battlefield V: Firestorm

    Game Lobby

    For most of this project, I worked on the Firestorm lobby. This is a unique feature of the Firestorm mode that other Battlefield modes don’t have. After a squad has gone through the matchmaking flow, they arrive in a lobby space where they can choose their class and then test out their weapons and hang out with other players while waiting for the server to be full.

    As this is the first experience that a new player will have of Firestorm, I needed to ensure that it was flawless. My work covered the design and engineering of the flow from the moment the player entered the server, all the way until their character jumps out of the plane above the Firestorm map. I put an extensive amount of time and effort into testing this flow to ensure that there were no bugs.

    Armour System

    Another feature that I got the opportunity to contribute to is the armour system in Firestorm. This system emerged quite late in production, so it was necessary to jump into the design and implementation as quickly as possible. I worked with designers to establish how the armour vests and plates would function in the mode. Each player starts with a small armour vest which can contain a single armour plate. Each armour plate adds additional health to a soldier. Finding larger vests allows players to equip more plates (up to a total of 3 plates, which equates to 150 more health).

  • Star Wars Battlefront II

    Star Wars Battlefront II

    Star Wars Battlefront II featured the Starfighter Assault mode, seeing 24 players pilot one of the iconic fighter ships, such as X-Wings or TIE fighters. Once they earned enough points, they could upgrade to a hero ship such as Darth Maul’s Scimitar. During a round, one side launches wave after wave of fighters against giant capital ships, while the other attempts to hold out and defend them. The mode was very well received, with critics praising it for the extremely tight controls and unique interactive maps.

    Starfighter Abilities

    During this project, I worked with a small team that was focused on delivering the gameplay components of the many starfighters. My role was to help design and implement all of the starfighter abilities in the game. You can see a few of these abilities in the trailer above, such as the invisibility cloak that is deployed by Maul’s Scimitar.

    Below you can see some of the loadouts for the starfighters in the game. Each starfighter has 3 abilities. Generally, the left-hand ability is defensive, the right-hand ability is offensive, and the middle ability is something unique to that fighter and more powerful.

    Frostbite Development

    Before entering production on the abilities, I worked to establish the different types that we would have in the game and how we would implement them. Each starfighter has 3 abilities, all of which have cooldowns. Some trigger and then last for a long duration, others fire off a one-shot effect. Many abilities can interact with each other or overlap in unique ways to provide the player with powerful combos.

    During production, I engineered each ability in Frostbite and collaborated with VFX artists, audio designers, engineers and gameplay designers to ensure that they feel incredible and meet the quality expected of Star Wars.

  • X-Wing VR Mission

    X-Wing VR Mission

    I had the incredible opportunity of working on the Rogue One: X-Wing VR mission, which was the first VR game to be made by EA. We developed the experience in Frostbite, building on DICE’s Star Wars Battlefront title, after extensive prototyping in Unity.

    The mission takes you through an incredibly immersive story of a rookie X-Wing pilot who is thrown into the action a little faster than they expected. At the time of release, it was one of the highest-quality VR experiences available and received overwhelming praise from all who got to play it.

    Before the project, a small group of Criterion devs and I experimented frequently with Unity VR during quarterly hackathons. The skills we developed during those hackathons were part of EA’s motivation to give the VR project to Criterion. The expertise I gained directly translated into the early prototypes of the mission. During the production phase, I collaborated with artists and designers to author several unique narrative moments that occur during the story and designed and developed the enemy AI logic, iterating to achieve the desired pacing and emotional impact.

    Developing in VR

    Creating a VR game always presents unique challenges. From very early on in development, we identified various ways in which VR can produce motion sickness and then designed the final experience to prevent these effects as best as possible. In general, we tried to avoid any sudden change in speed or direction, and also prevent the ship from rolling, as these techniques all proved to increase the comfort for the player.

    Interacting with the world in VR provides a lot more immersion than in standard games. Because of this, we took the opportunity to let the player press any button within the X-Wing cockpit, and made sure that all of them do something! Small details like this greatly added to the realism of the mission and won over the hearts of many fans.