I worked on this project at Gameloft Brisbane as a Mid UI Programmer + Animator.

I continued my growth from the My Little Pony game to this game a lot. We transitioned from UE4 to UE5 for this project, making full use of Epic's tool to develop for multiple platforms this time - not just Apple Arcade. I worked on it all the way from pre-production to release-ready content - although I had to move on to another project before I could see it's release fully through; I worked on it for the better part of 1 year. Safe to say I learned a lot of different things as my responsibilities ramped up and I was fully functioning at a Mid-level.

I was responsible for prototyping all of the 7 UI minigames on this project, developing their gameplay and UI-code in entirety. I was pumping out playable prototypes every 3 days for these minigames and working with designers to rapidly iterate on feedback. Originally, 2 of the UI minigames were developed by other programmers but I was asked to redo their prototypes as the quality of my prototypes and the speed I was doing them at was undeniable. That's how I ended up developing all of them.

On top of that, I was responsible for developing out other polished elements. I was responsible for the 3D globe animations as part of the world-travel flow. I also developed the yarn string for the suspect database clue 'board'. And I was responsible for evolving our render capture system from 'My Little Pony: Mane Merge' to show characters inside UI, with tooling for artists to put 3D models anywhere in UI using preset (or custom) camera shots aligned to skeletal mesh bones!

This project let me prove how much I'd grown since the previous project at Gameloft Brisbane, and how much I provide to not only the project's milestones, but the team environment too!

Game Clips

Here are a series of clips of things I worked on.

Pick Pocket Minigame

I was responsible for all the programming, which includes: Gameplay + UI + Technical Animation. I had to make a grid system that could calculate the percentage of each tile's revealed amount to run performantly on mobiles, while using a render texture to draw the revealed areas. This render texture was then passed through a material I made that would give the edges a scan-line glow effect. I also did all the animations for this.

Hacking Minigame

I was responsible for all the programming, which includes: Gameplay + UI + Technical Animation. The levels are completely randomly generated at run-time, which was a very fun creative problem-solving exercise. I was able to make this prototype functional in 3 days. I then added some polish in the following couple days (like the animation of the nodes travelling over the wires).

Signal Minigame

I was responsible for all the programming, which includes: Gameplay + UI + Technical Animation. I used line drawing to create previews of the sine waves in both the composite display and singular displays. The final scoring is based off sampling a series of points to see if the wave is within a threshold all the way along. The parameters of these tests were exposed for design to adjust but ultimately driven by me as designers put their trust in my judgement here!

Untangle Minigame

I was responsible for all the programming, which includes: Gameplay + UI + Technical Animation. For this, I had to come up with an algorithm to generate a complicated solution that wasn't overkill. I decided to implement the solution by creating a flush grid of nodes that would connect only to adjacent neighbours. I then shuffled these nodes until a minimum number of intercepts were active (based on the difficulty). I also used line mathematics to cache points of intercept and update UI elements to position along them to get the spark animations going. I also made the spark texture + particles, and it was my suggestion to make a burst of sparks when plugging a node in.

Here's a bonus prototype clip of the minigame I managed to save. During this time, I had no textures from artists, so to make this I used entirely-vanilla functionality of UMG, with solid fill and rounded boxes. (Aside from the spark texture which I made in Photoshop).

And another bonus clip of the very first prototype in pre-production before we had to restart all our code for production-ready development. This featured textures I made in photoshop for the sparks again, but also screw textures I made as well. The demonstration of gameplay code here was most important though!

Lockpicking Minigame

I was responsible for all the programming, which includes: Gameplay + UI + Technical Animation. In-fact, I did all the animations for this mini-game as well. This one was a tricky one, as I had to write my own functions to push the springs up from the key teeth pushing them, all done in UI! Since it's done in Unreal's UI, geometry is unreliable (cached from previous frame only) and there's no physics system, so I just had to write good old math to handle the movements, initiated by ticking float tweens!

Here's a bonus prototype clip of the minigame I managed to save. During this time, I had no textures from the artists, so to make this I used entirely-vanilla functionality of UMG, with solid fill and rounded boxes.

Safe Cracking Minigame

I was responsible for all the programming, which includes: Gameplay + UI + Technical Animation. Safe cracking went through several cycles, as it's design was the least intuitive to explain to players who didn't know much about safes. The design is not my area but I just wanted to explain I programmed many iterations of this over the course of a few weeks. My changes were super quick so designers were able to quickly give feedback and we went through several iterations within the milestone, while still working on other minigames!

Item Inspection Minigame

I was responsible for all the programming. As we were using a render capture target to display this 3D object in the UI, we did not have access to the typical "de-project from screen" space functions, so I had to make the mathematics on my own for the ray-casts and write up a specific interaction system for this minigame to work! I was also responsible for a lot of the tweening animations of the objects themselves, as they were most efficiently handled via code instead of putting extra workload on the 3D animators.

Suspect Database: Clue Board

I worked on various bits of the suspect database, but this video is showcasing the Clue Board (Yarn Board) I worked on! It live updates yarn textures to connect between different clue photos. I also programmed all the button / input / movement of these clue photo 'buttons' and did the animations of them too.