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Terrible Life Expectancy

Roguelike TV Show Zombie game

I was hired for this project thanks to my previous experience releasing a roguelike game.

At the same time, this game has presented new challenges for me and I've acquired now skills for my toolset.

It's turning out to be a great game that I hope people will enjoy, and working with such experienced devs is a great learning opportunity for me.

Company

Super Awesome Hyper Dimensional Mega Team

Genre

Action, Rogue-like, adventure

Platforms

PC

Status

Release date pending 

Role

Gameplay Programmer

In this project we're only two programmers so I'm responsible for a lot of features, systems and content in the game. Some of the most interesting stuff:

• Creating a complex navigation system using multithreading with Unity's Job System to handle the movement and collisions of hundreds of enemies or more without scaling the computing cost, using Flow Field pathfinding.
• Performance optimization, making it so technical limitations are not a problem for the team.
• Created and implemented all enemies and their custom behaviors, including bosses.
• Implemented the game save system.
• Created and implemented all ultimate attacks, traps and passive weapons as well as the systems that handle them.
• Implemented all the different mission types of the game.
• Developed the enemy wave system the game uses to decide which and how many enemies to throw at you and how.
• Implemented systems to adapt ui depending on controller and platform.
• Created and implemented a system to add altered states for the enemies and the player.
• Created internal tools to help with development, ensuring everything is fine when making builds, setting up variables, extracting data from the game, etc.

And besides all that, lots and lots of small changes, fixes, features and such. It's impossible to count them all. Making a game like this is a matter of creating lots of systems that entwine together to make it all work and adding lots of content for the system to build the runs with so players get a varied and interesting experience. I've also contributed a lot to the design of the game. Working in small teams always means you get to participate more and dabble in tasks beyond your post.I'm always trying to bring new ideas to make the best game we can, though of course having a great team with their own cool ideas is key.

I think the most complex aspect for me and the most valuable one is everything related with enemy behavior and navigation. Working with Unity's Job System wasn't easy at first but it's given me a new tool that I'm eager to use in future projects. The optimizations possible with it are amazing, and I'm very proud of how all the zombies in the game move and behave. The way they go towards the player while still having space to customize them so they behave lika a true horde and you can feel which enemies are bigger, meaner and stronger, and how collisions are handled between them without using Unity's physics, just math and multithreading. It's all amazing and a key aspect of the which, if absent, would have severely limited the game and made bringing the team's vision to life basically impossible.