Stuck Together

Description

This is the current project I work on in my free time just for fun. I work with another 4 people in charge of the art, level design and sound. Its very different to what I do in my day job with AAA games so I very much enjoy it as a nice change and an opportunity to learn things I do not get a chance to use with EA. I am in charge of all code on this project and have really enjoyed working on it. Unreal Engine is one of my favourite engine environments to work in due to its non destructive workflow and how it handles development with a team that has many different disciplines/skills.

Stuck Together is a 2 player coop semi-isometric shooter where teamwork is key. Each player controls half of a character with one controller the torso and the other player controlling the legs. Both players must work together to traverse and shooter their way through hordes of enemies in a expanding level with each wave. The aim is to see how long you can survive together and it your teamwork leads to higher and higher scores each time.

This project is the third major project I have worked on with Digital Pine Studios which is the Indie game company I own and manage in my free time. At the time of writing this, I run the company purely out of passion and fun, not for profit and my AAA game development comes first and this is a very nice hobbie I love to participate in with my friends.

Project Technical Aspects

Use of the Unreal C++ API

This game, compared to Orune our last game, is much more technically challenging due to its coop nature and greater demands for gameplay. It has led to me to master the Unreal API in order to be able to achieve the mechanics we require and I now have over 5 years experience with gameplay programming in Unreal Engine from this and the previous projects.

Custom Rendering

We use our own custom rendering that tweaks the PBR shading model defaulted in unreal. We pass all shaders we render through our own code that alters various behaviors about them relating to lighting and shadows to achieve a stylistic look.

Advanced Animation Scripting

Since both halves of a character in this game can be controlled separately while being both together and far apart. It causes some animation challenges we had to solve early in the project. We currently have a custom animation system built on top of Unreals' that has custom logic and scripting to it to handle our need for more complex animations.