Jade Friend
Sigma-Phoenix Productions
Rennovator Rift
Unity C# group project for Ravensbourne University consisting of an entire class of Year 2 Game developers and Programmers (46 students) from February to March 2024
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The game is a 2D Platformer/exploration game, where the player must use a grapple hook and simple movement mechanics to explore and repair a spaceship containing a colony of people .
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Due to the mix of skills involved in the group project, the style is a blend of 2D pixel art and 3D low poly, all passed through a compression shader to stylise the world and fit together.
As a large group project, i was assigned to work on the key systems of Checkpoints, save and loading and a small shadergraph system that would provide a pixellated artstyle to 3D assets.
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I also produced the grapple hook mechanic, being mindful of others and making my code maintainable and able to be implimented by almost anyone.
When working on the game, i was under a lot of stress to get the shader working despite numerous issues with 2D sprites and the shader graph. Im glad i was able to learn to a certain degree how the shader systems work in unity and to come up with creative solutions to the problems i faced in only a few weeks of work.
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The checkpoint system was a vital part of the game's difficulty, letting the game be hard without punishing the player for slight mistakes.
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While the shader i had developed worked on my own machine, as it had issues before submission it was disabled in the final build, however i still feel proud of the methods i used to circumvent 2D sprites failing to write to the depth buffer. I used an intersecting flat plane that wrote to the buffer to cut a hole in the shader, and then projected what would be behind the hole onto the plane using a variant of my shader.
