Flatliners was the title of my final year project at Salford University. It is a first person speed-running game, based on CSS surf maps and other community-spawned games.
Here is one of the promo gameplay trailers the team made. (The music may be quite loud!)
I was the sole programmer for this project, which was made with Unity in about 4 months.
The game itself included a tutorial and a single level to showcase the core mechanics.
Some of the other features which were interesting to develop were:
1) the Ghost/Replay system which not only recorded a playthrough, but also allowed the player to compete against their own records. It also featured some rudimentary data visualisation for saved playthroughs.
2) movement itself was quite complex on this game as the exact details and contingencies weren't finalised in the design until late on in the development cycle. It had a strange mix of inertia, fixed (and jump-based) acceleration, and very high speeds.
3) the projectile system was pretty challenging; the game was dealing with very high speeds most of the time, so there were a lot of issues with spawning bullets and detecting collisions. I solved these by performing ray-based distance checks and only spawning the projectile when the distance was sufficiently far - otherwise, it assumed a hit and spawned the explosion of the projectile immediately. (This helped improve the control fidelity of the Rocket Jumps).
4) to make the game scalable, I added a modular level system - unity asset bundles were added to a specific directory, along with a picture and a manifest, which provided in-game information about the new levels.
There were many other rewarding aspects, as well, but these were the points that stuck with me.
Despite gathering a lot of attention (the game was showcased at Insomnia54 and other events throughout the UK, and was a semi-finalist for Microsoft's Imagine Cup award), Flatliners was never released.
More information (and a demo) can be found at the IndieDB page.
Here is one of the promo gameplay trailers the team made. (The music may be quite loud!)
I was the sole programmer for this project, which was made with Unity in about 4 months.
The game itself included a tutorial and a single level to showcase the core mechanics.
Some of the other features which were interesting to develop were:
1) the Ghost/Replay system which not only recorded a playthrough, but also allowed the player to compete against their own records. It also featured some rudimentary data visualisation for saved playthroughs.
2) movement itself was quite complex on this game as the exact details and contingencies weren't finalised in the design until late on in the development cycle. It had a strange mix of inertia, fixed (and jump-based) acceleration, and very high speeds.
3) the projectile system was pretty challenging; the game was dealing with very high speeds most of the time, so there were a lot of issues with spawning bullets and detecting collisions. I solved these by performing ray-based distance checks and only spawning the projectile when the distance was sufficiently far - otherwise, it assumed a hit and spawned the explosion of the projectile immediately. (This helped improve the control fidelity of the Rocket Jumps).
4) to make the game scalable, I added a modular level system - unity asset bundles were added to a specific directory, along with a picture and a manifest, which provided in-game information about the new levels.
There were many other rewarding aspects, as well, but these were the points that stuck with me.
Despite gathering a lot of attention (the game was showcased at Insomnia54 and other events throughout the UK, and was a semi-finalist for Microsoft's Imagine Cup award), Flatliners was never released.
More information (and a demo) can be found at the IndieDB page.
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