About

BookWyrm (12 people)

August 2024 - May 2025

Lead Programmer

Unity

I touched every area of the game throughout GRIMWAR's development. Being the Lead Programmer, I was in charge of one other programmer and was responsible for managing the Github repository. Some examples of what I worked on include setting up sprints for the programmers, creating all major gameplay features, and integrating 3D art, 2D art, audio, and VFX into all aspects of the game.

Showcase of all spell abilities.

Contributions

Player

• Developed and iterated upon player movement (wall-running, sliding, fast-falling).
• Dealt with player health, damage, death, and respawning.
• Created four unique player attacks and the system for thier pick-up and drop.

Enemies

• Created and integrated a 3D pathfinding system for flying and grounded enemies. This pain point at the start of the project was solved by lots of research in path finding methods, eventually settling on a combination of direct pursuit and waypoints placed around the level.
• Added visual debugs for level designers to determine enemy range and line of sight.
• Setup enemy health, attacks, death, pathfinding, and decision state machine.

Showcase of enemy waypoint pathfinding.

Systems

• Created a checkpoint system for easy usability for level designers.
• Due to performance concerns, I implemented a custom update loop that prevented enemies from running checks every frame.
• Debugged, fixed, and expanded upon a "best time" tracker, that allows for the player to race their ghost.
• Debugged, fixed, and expanded upon an enemy wave system that spawns in set enemy waves over time.
• Implemented settings that are saved between sessions.
• Setup all UI interaction.

UI

• Created the layout for the main menu and the pause menu from provided art and concepts.

Github and Project Management

• Maintained sprints and kept the programmers on track for our vertical slice and MVP releases.
• Oversaw Github operations and resolved any merge conflicts that arose.

Events

• Helped manage a playtesting station and collected player feedback at a community event.

What I Learned

Working on GRIMWAR taught me the importance of clean, readable classes. Its no fun rewriting what could have been written correctly the first time. Of course, I had experience in creating classes that were adaquetly separated between jobs, but I had never had to write this much code that another programmer was going to be consistently referencing. There were many instances that I neglected cleaning up a class before moving on to the next task. I have taken it to heart that someone else is always going to be trying to decipher my code, myself. :)

Project Management was not something that was new to me, however I was nowhere near an expert. I have always been the kind of person to start typing and ask important questions later. GRIMWAR was not a struggle in that regard because I was responsible for keeping another person on track as well as myself. Although I would say it was a success, I learned a lot in the way of making sure I was ahead of the curve when it came to having tasks on the board and future plans laid out in advance.