Platforms : PC
Type : Exploration, bird simulation
Skills : AI and game programming, team managing and marketing
Time spent on the project : ~ 7 months
Engine and tools : Unreal Engine, Perforce and Notion
My contribution
My role in this project was AI lead, which meant that I took care of giving tasks related to AI to my colleague Caroline Forget and myself. I assigned to myself the AI of Shy Gary and all the vehicles. I’ve also contributed to the marketing of the game.
Shy Gary
One of our NPCs named Shy Gary has the behavior of constantly running away from the player and be incredibly afraid of us. During production, Shy Gary was a challenge to balance to make him fun as a target.
During playtests, he was the most difficult NPC to hit mostly because he was unpredictable. So to fix that, he needed a lot of anticipation. So I added animations for when he turns around and when he notices the player after he’s been idle.
Next, I added the fact that if he gets attacked in a short amount of time, he has a bigger chance of finding a shelter, giving an opening for the player to yell next to him.
BoatTrucks and BoatTruckCopters
The base script of the two types of vehicles were made by Caroline Forget, and once I joined the team, I was given the responsibility to fix any bugs related to it and future features linked to them. The major behaviors added were the crashing down and the ejection of trash to add more obstacles to the player.
Marketing
Towards the end of the project, I decided to join the marketing team with Jakob Bouchard, Sasha Fortier and Marianne Richard. On my part, I created the trailer, helped with the descriptions and headers on the steam page and added some gameplay screenshots.