Snowpainters
Arcade Racer | Unreal Engine 4 | Team of 40 (14 programmers)
Physics and Game Systems Programmer | Unreal Blueprints
Snowpainters is an arcade racing game where you play as speedy color-changing penguins. Play alone or with friends, change between colors, race on colorful paint trails, and bring color to a snowy environment!
Contributions
Using a component-based architecture, I helped design the penguin’s movement. We started from scratch and had a functional penguin by the end of the first milestone
Implemented penguin collisions and gravity
Defined all penguin parameters in data so that they could be tuned for balance
Balanced all penguin types for unique feel and gameplay balance
Switched to the Game Systems team and inherited an existing codebase
Building off of the current standings system, I added the ability to accurately determine the penguin’s placement when taking branching paths on the track
Implemented the wrong way tracker
Auto-finished AI after all players finished, creating estimates for AI race time
Blueprint function to calculate the penguin’s current acceleration
Blueprint function used to reflect the penguin’s velocity when colliding with walls
Blueprint data table initialization for all tunable acceleration variables
Blueprint function to get the nearest spline to the player to determine if the player is going the wrong way
Snowpainters team
Post-Mortem
As the first project I’ve worked on of this size, and the first major project in Unreal Engine 4, there were many learning moments. I had to develop communication skills not only within the physics team so we could work together to get the penguin moving, but across disciplines so the designers knew how and what the penguin’s could and could not do. The cross discipline communication wasn’t always easy, and we found that early on a lot of information slipped through the cracks. As the project continued, it got better, but if we were to do it all over again, we know what works and doesn’t and we could establish those communication pipelines much better.