“Explore an abandoned lab on an isolated planet. Slash & dash through its hordes of hostile inhabitants to claim the prized artifact that lies deep within.”
My Contributions
I was responsible for creating the Player movement. I started off my first draft by making a player where the velocity gets applied instantly in the direction the joystick was pointing and started my first round of feedback, using one person from my group and one from the outside. From the feedback I started iterating, and asking for more feedback until I ended up with a very slight start up slowness as well as a max turn rate to make the player rotation look more natural where my playtesters thought the movement felt good.
This approach was a direct reaction from some of the feedback I got on Traum’s movement and I think it turned out great. It fit the game very well and I’m really happy with the result.
Shadows
I was responsible for adding shadows to our engine. This was the first time I got in contact with graphics techniques and I really enjoyed seeing the pixelated player after finally making the shadows work. It took a little longer than expected and I got pressed by the graphics team to get it done earlier so that they could get a feel for how the finished product would look.
Juggling shadow mapping and player movement, both needing to be implemented very early in a short project was not a smart move. It was a rough lesson in estimating how much time something will take and attempting to plan for the entire project. The player is the most important character in the game and is needed for every other discipline to work.
In the end I realized that doing shadows as well as the player wasn’t going to work and I had to offload some tasks onto other programmers to compensate. It didn’t feel good giving tasks that I was responsible for to others but it would’ve been worse if they didn’t get done in time.
In the end the shadows ended up looking phenomenal and I am really happy to have gotten it done for the project. I truly believe it elevated the graphical quality of our game.
Height Fog
The game lacked a feeling of depth with its isometric style made way for weird tangents between different height levels. A way to combat this feeling was using height fog.
The height fog makes reachable and unreachable areas more clear to the player however it wasn’t perfect. A lot of player pointed out that it was impossible to know if the button (the emissive cube on the other side of the chasm) was on the same layer as the player. And I agree, looking at the image you could probably understand that they are on the same layer but with quick glances its easy to dismiss the button and think the level is impossible. The height fog made it clearer but it didn’t fully fulfill its purpose. However like with the shadows I believe the graphical quality improved overall.
Placeholder Productions
Programmers
Tobias Garpenhall
Truls Rockström
Liam Sjöholm
Nils Mårtensson
Harry Örnö Persson
Artists
Maja Rosvall
William Mårtensson
Stephanie Madsen
Amanda Bergholtz
Animators
Soon-Ie L. O.
Oskar Lind
Level Designers
Anna Sjöberg
Pontus Hedenberg