EGREGORE
About the Project
First-person adventure game, set in modern Egypt, where you uncover an occult conspiracy by manipulating nodes on a graph to shape your reality.
The core mechanics in this game are navigation, conversation, and graphing (created by yours truly from scratch). Graphing, in this case, refers to graph theory, not an XY Graph.
Essentially, there are nodes that represent nouns (people, place, things) or adjectives. The player connects and disconnects these nodes in order to change their environment, simulating the player's direct effect on the world.
System Development
I implemented the graphing system using Unreal Engine 5 with both C++ and Blueprints. It allows you to connect/disconnect nodes, move nodes, and solve puzzles upon connecting the proper set of nodes. Though there are 3 core mechanics, this one has certainly been the most time intensive.
Recently, I've been gearing my work with the graph more towards polish and juicing. For example, I created a functionality for the link points around the nodes to rotate in the direction of the node they're connected to. It really helps game feel and makes it all feel way more reactive. In upcoming sprints, I will be dedicating more time to adding visual effects/niagara systems to the links between nodes, as well as the nodes themselves.
Technical Management
As the Lead Engineer, it is my duty to assign tasks to my fellow engineer, check in on their progress during our one-week sprints, and to run code reviews, assuring that their code follows style and optimization guidelines.
I worked with our Lead Producer to create a burndown chart with tabs for each sprint, including a velocity chart that gives a visual indication of how many hours of work we'll have left at the end of the sprint. We also use Trello as a backlog & area for feature requests.