Game Programmer
Pass On
This platformer is one of my favourite games I have been part of making so far. I really feel like the game turned out well, and that the team was truly engaged in creating it. I learned a lot about using plugins for the level parsing, and how to communicate with the user of one of my systems when I wanted feedback or to give them information about how to use it. This game was also the first time I encountered Dear ImGui.
Project Coordinator
I also took on some project management, like keeping track of all our deadlines, trying to catch communication errors and making sure everyone on the team was feeling ok. This of course had some impact on my own work, meaning that I sometimes had less time for my programming tasks.
I do believe, however, that it was worth it. A smoothly working team is in my opinion one of the most important things to make great games, and if that meant a little less programming work got done, I still think that we ended up both with a better game, but also, and most importantly, with a happier and less stressed-out team.
Story
As you might have figured out already, I am really interested in narratives in games. Therefore, it is only natural for me to be part of creating the narrative of a game I am working on if I get the chance.
In this case, I mostly worked on showing the story in the game in different ways, primarily by creating dialogue boxes that popped up on all check points to hint at what was going on in the game world. I also created the system used to show cutscenes, logos and credits in the beginning and end of the game.
Above the pure programming-related tasks, I was a part of the story task force, and worked some on the story itself, even though I mainly had to prioritize other things in order to make the game the best it could be.
Speedrun mode
At the end of this project, we realized there was some extra time to include a speedrun mode. More often than not, you find yourself in the opposite situation and have to cut something when the deadlines are closing in, so I was really happy that we had managed to do the reverse.
I took on the task of creating said mode, which consisted of supporting a different version of the game that unlocked when you finished the main game. Like you would expect, the speedrun mode added a timer ticking away as you played and a system to keep track of the fastest completed speedruns on that computer and showcase them to the player. I also needed to do some rework on our courses so that they didn’t load things like collectables, checkpoints and cutscenes.
Parsing levels from Tiled
I spent some time working on trying to use Tileson, a json parser made to parse Tiled maps to C++, to load the level designers’ levels into our in-house engine. First, I integrated it into our engine, and then I tried to use it to load the levels from their json files.
Sadly, Tileson seemed to create memory leaks in our game, so we decided to not use Tileson. Instead, we simply used rapidjson to read the json files our level data was saved in.