My Contributions
Designed mini-games to be extremely intuitive
I implemented/designed our connect-the-dots minigame, dragging mini-game, and implemented our animations. Along with this I created a subtitle system to make our experience more accessible to everyone who came to see our exhibit. Mini-games were designed to be as intuitive as possible so that people could get through our experience in around 3 minutes.
Connect the Dots
Dragging Game
Animation
Software Engineer and Game Design Lead
As the Lead for these roles I was tasked with coordinating all of the in-engine work as well as optimization, game experience design, and overall user experience design.
Rendered an accurate night sky with real data
All of the stars in the night sky were rendered using real world data gathered from the Gaia database. I used the right ascension, declination, and relative magnitudes to place particles in a particle system accurately in the sky and sized them correctly via a complex algorithm. After placing them in the sky, I could easily use line renderers between stars in constellations to make their outlines. As some final touches, I made the stars twinkle in and out on a randomized animation curve to make them feel more realistic.
Editor Overview
Constellations and Stars in the sky
Implemented Constellation Interactivity
I wanted interactions with constellations to feel awesome and intuitive so I made it as simple as pointing at one and pressing a button. I worked with our sound design team to get high quality hover and selection sounds to really make each interaction feel great. Lastly, I added bloom to make the constellation lines pop.
Added extra flair to the environment with particles and various objects
To bring the world to life I added fireflies to the environment and made shooting stars appear in the sky based on where the player was looking. I also handled the terrain map and the grass in the scene.
Collaborated with various roles to polish this game
For this project, I needed to collaborate with our 2D artists, 3D artists, sound designers, voice actor, UI/UX team, and our research team in order to create a cohesive and polished product.
Pre-production
Bradley University holds an expo called FUSE at the end of every school year. They bring together teams of 15+ people to create ideas that are later pitched to the faculty and the best of those ideas move onto production the next semester. I'm really glad to say my team, Constellation Exploration, got picked!!! I am the team lead for this project so my job was to coordinate all of the meetings, create timelines, and handled quality control for this document. Going into production, I'll be doing similar things except it will involve more work coordinating our research team, UI/UX team, 2D/3D art teams, sound team, and our programming team. I'll be regularly updating this page as our production continues.
Here is a GIF of our first tech demo for the experience where all of the constellations are mapped out for our longitude/latitude for the night of the exhibit at 9pm. Since I was the only programmer at the time, I was responsible for writing the script to take real-world data gathered from various databases to map stars to their correct locations and to render lines between them.
