Pizzapocalypse 2
Technical Game Designer
Pizzapocalypse 2 is the sequel to Pizzapocalypse, this time being a commercial product at a last year project with my fellow students. This was another third person platformer about using an expressive moveset comparable to Super Mario Oddessey.
I contributed to this project by creating the dynamic camera, tools related to achievements and camera, working on core systems and being in charge of technical quality control for our system designers. I also worked on project related things such as the art prop pipeline, code standards and processes for blueprints and teaching technical skills to my fellow designers.
I contributed to this project by creating the dynamic camera, tools related to achievements and camera, working on core systems and being in charge of technical quality control for our system designers. I also worked on project related things such as the art prop pipeline, code standards and processes for blueprints and teaching technical skills to my fellow designers.
Early prototype of the camera, no camera input used here
Dynamic Camera
Research
As the only technical designer and with only one programmer on our team complex systems often fell on my shoulders. I started with extensive research into dynamic cameras, noting down differences between our original and games like Super Mario Oddessey, looking up GDC talks on the topic and prototyping things I came across. I documented all my iterations finding out how to improve while keeping my lead up-to-date on the progress.
My research resulted in 3 things:
1. Technical understanding and skills working with cameras;
2. Concrete list of features to explore or add in a way my lead could understand them and what project problems they solve;
3. Different possible technical approaches. I will go over my steps for research.
My research resulted in 3 things:
1. Technical understanding and skills working with cameras;
2. Concrete list of features to explore or add in a way my lead could understand them and what project problems they solve;
3. Different possible technical approaches. I will go over my steps for research.
Goals and challenges assesment
First step in my research is finding out the biggest challenges within our project and formulating them in such a way that it is easy to communicate and research. The goals were mainly given in the form of our game pillars, previous game's design and challenges were issues we had from our previous project and how we intended on changing the camera to dynamic. I formulated them into 5 topics, numbering them to use later and giving them descriptions to make them easy to understand.
Camera feed-forward and following
Research approach
My research consisted of multiple approaches: researching comparable games, researching talks and articles, researching technical implementations and lastly prototyping in engine.
For comparable games I looked into recently released games within our genre that also used a third person dynamic camera. Playing relevant parts of those games and noting down things like metrics and features.
Talks, articles and technical research was mainly noting down information already out there for quick summaries and reduced to feature proposals to my lead could approve them and understand what they entail.
Lastly prototyping was taking feature proposals and implementing them to a lesser degree, for some features this helped contextualize it for my lead for other features it helped me get a feel for future implementation.
For comparable games I looked into recently released games within our genre that also used a third person dynamic camera. Playing relevant parts of those games and noting down things like metrics and features.
Talks, articles and technical research was mainly noting down information already out there for quick summaries and reduced to feature proposals to my lead could approve them and understand what they entail.
Lastly prototyping was taking feature proposals and implementing them to a lesser degree, for some features this helped contextualize it for my lead for other features it helped me get a feel for future implementation.
Tools and architecture
Camera tools
Early in development I sat down with my lead and the level designers and considered different tools we would want in the game to control the camera. Using my research as a basis we decided to have focus points, static cameras, 2D camera and cut-scenes. I made all of those and continued support for them throughout development making sure documentation was up-to-date and my level designers were using them properly without issues.
In the end having enough tools for my level designers to be creative and give a bit of control of the camera while avoiding giving too much room for incostistency and chaos the original game had with its tools.
In the end having enough tools for my level designers to be creative and give a bit of control of the camera while avoiding giving too much room for incostistency and chaos the original game had with its tools.
2 Examples (not full screen)
Achievement tool
For Pizzapocalypse 2 we wanted to support a lot of different challenges, achievements and the like. In the original student project we hard coded all 14 achievements and 3 challanges which was not scalable since Pizzapocalypse 2 was suppose to have 10x the content. This is why I made a system and tool for creating achievements and challenges, making it easy to create them quickly and have the back-end store which challenges and achievements were already obtained. This tool was made in collaboration with my lead to get an idea of what achievements and challenges it should support and with our programmer to do some engine level mirroring to allow me to track all relevant variables and events from actor classes.
Problem solving
Material animations
Technical Game Designers end up a lot in problem solving, whether this finding out how to implement something or optimizing something a level designer or system designer made for scalability. One of these examples is material animations.
Early on in the project system designers wanted to add some game feel to the game and adding bobbing and spinning to certain objects by updating the transform once or twice per frame. When I added a feature with bobbing I looked at the costs and saw updating transforms was not worth it. I took the initative to update our master materials to include animations for this done on the GPU allowing for less load and higher frame rate. With the help of the team I onboarded the system designers and updated the old assets to work with this new animation.
Early on in the project system designers wanted to add some game feel to the game and adding bobbing and spinning to certain objects by updating the transform once or twice per frame. When I added a feature with bobbing I looked at the costs and saw updating transforms was not worth it. I took the initative to update our master materials to include animations for this done on the GPU allowing for less load and higher frame rate. With the help of the team I onboarded the system designers and updated the old assets to work with this new animation.
Insert gif of camera tools