Details

School arranged group project with the theme ‘Symbiosis’, which received such good feedback that we continued working on it as a side-project.

Spark & Kling is a split-screen co-op puzzle platformer game where the players take advantage of their abilities and surroundings to escape the laboratory of a mad scientist.

Team

Paragraph about the team dynamic, how we worked together and what I took away from it.

Gameplay Programmer

I worked closely with the game designers to develop and iterate over gameplay tech such as the movement system and character abilities in order to make them feel good. I was also in charge of developing flexible systems such as Kling’s ability to shoot metal gel orbs that can animate objects depending on the weight the metal gel orbs add.

Technical Artist

Throughout the project I was able to give advise and help improve and create bespoke shaders according to what the artists described. I made the player visibility shader that creates a silhouette around the players if they’re occluded such that they can find each other. I also ended up improving the transparent gel shader we used in order to make it possible to animate certain properties. I remember our artists had thrown together a pretty nice looking viscous chemical fluid shader, but it was visibly clipping into objects that would intersect it, so I quickly went in and added surface depth fading and asked the artists if it’s something we should keep, and I was told it was exactly what they wanted.

Technical Animator

Whilst we had an artists dedicated to making animations for the game, we didn’t have anyone to stitch those together, so I ended up in charge of setting up the character animation state machines. Early on in the design process I realized that in order to keep my systems modular and flexible for our designers, I decided to take advantage of how Unity animations work by developing a workflow that would let you animate the states of objects, materials or anything if depending on the state of puzzles.

Builds

One thing I ended up helping with was making sure that the build process went well for our product owner. I’d usually accompany our PO over Discord or physically on-site during the build process to immediately patch any potential errors that cropped up during the building process. And we made sure to always do this well before our deadlines, as ensuring we had a proper and working build by the end of the day was more important than being able to squeeze in every feature we wanted.