Robin Hardy AI Programmer

Since there is no trailer for the game due to the short amount of time we worked on it I have made a video where I go through the entire game.

Finders Keepers

This is a 3rd person platforming game where you control a frog named Wart and a mech to reach the top of the tower.


This is the first project in which I worked with other disciplines, the first time I worked with Unreal Engine, and the first time I released a game.

The concepting had already been done and now the game had to be fully developed and finished.

I was a Gameplay programmer and worked on the wall climbing, saving, and VFX.


Link to the game: https://buas.itch.io/finders-keepers

Details:

1st-year project

Team: 9 people

Time: 8 weeks

Engine: Unreal Engine 4


Team Composition:

PR: 2

DP: 3

VA: 4

My contributions

As mentioned my main contribution was the wall climbing. I made this feature from scratch

as it was planned but they didn't have time to make a prototype for it during the 2 weeks

of concepting. On the right you can see the result. Wart can climb on spherical surfaces as well as

long as he has the stamina left to do so.

Besides this, I made most of the VFX for the game in a basic form that artists could then polish. If I had to make the finished version, I would ask for feedback from the team and get pointers on how to improve it.

Below here you can see gifs of VFX's I made. In the first one, you see the engine flame at first it didn't have the emission which was added later by the artists. In the 2nd and 3rd gif there are smoke particle effects which took a lot of iterating to get to where they are now as it was first using yellow dust and went in the wrong directions.

One of the more important things that I implemented was the saving system. The team wanted

to have save points in the game so you could save leave and come back. Another reason for save

points is so we could divide the game into levels which were basically sections of the game. This

took a while to do but in the end it is functional and in the game. In the gif I show that I can go to the 2nd checkpoint, close the game, startup the game and click continue, and be at the 2nd checkpoint.

Bugfixing and polishing


Optimizations:

Implement LOD's as the game was getting laggy with all the assets and triangles.