Cassie Parsons
Gameplay Programmer, Sword Fighter
I am a games programmer with an interest in writing games systems that are designed to be flexible and easy to use, both by programmers and non-programmers
My skills include:
This project was by far one of the largest ones I'd been on before, going on for 9 months total on a team of 8, it ways a great learning opportunity, during this project I learned the importance of code maintaiability and how to practically use inheritance with components in the Unity engine, as well as working well with designers and making tools for them to do their job effectively.
The guard behaviour used a state machine, using an abstract class and inheritance for each state. The guard behaviour was set up as a puppet, with functions that would be called by the state machine to control it's behaviour, such as move, look, chase. Making adding new behaviour simpler and cleaner.
Since we kept adding new hackable behaviours, it was important that hackable objects be simple to add. All hackable scripts inherit from an asbtract class. The player searches for these base types, and when hacking calls the virtual function OnHack. Meaning when new hackable objects are added, no changes to existing behaviours needs to happen
The spotlight behaviour was a puppet class, that could be told to move, and to follow the player. There were anchor objects that could be placed in the scene by our designer to control where the spotlight moves to, including a patrol anchor, which followed a repeating path, rather then just staying still. To control when the spotlight changed anchors, triggers were created which took various triggers, such as player contact, noises, alarms, and hacked objects and changed the anchors.
The display was a GUI intended to tell the player how far away the death wall and the checkpoints were. This used a tracker component which was attached to game objects to be tracked When the player was a certain distance from an object, it would be added to a sorted list of objects to be displayed. The GUI would appear on either the right or left, and would get larger the closer the player was the larger the GUI appeared
The promotional photo used on the main page was created by Eden Dunbar, a member of our team
END Protocol was a game we created for the Halloween Game jam hosted by AGDS, this was a 2 day game jam done with the Cosmic Coda team, primarily to see if we work well together, While this was a much shorter project it gave valuable insight into hpow our team could best work together, making a highly valuable game jam. In END protocol, you need to protect the Coda, a space ship stuck in a asteroid belt, you do this by grabbing asteroids and flinging them away. I implemented the grabbing code for the meteors, while our other programmer implemented the physics to make grabbing the meteors feel more fun. Additionally I implemented the shipa nd the taking damage, and how that affected the time it took to escape. During this jam we learned some useful practices, as well as some that were not as useful. Most of our planning was on a collaborative drawing board, which was useful for design and art, but for programmers writing a list of features, it wasn't ideal, other tools such as Jira were much better suited for that task