Multiplayer experience about elevating future players.

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About

Polariis (2 People)

May 2025 - June 2025

Co-Producer and Programmer

Unity

KiBo is an experimental multiplayer experience that a friend and I worked on for the thatgamecompany x COREBLAXER GAME JAM 2025. This is still the largest jam I have taken part in and I am extremely happy with the results. KiBo was a learning experience in procedural animation, netcode, and time-management. I did all of the programming and created some VFX.

The main trailer.

Showcase of inverse kinematics.

Contributions

Animation Rigging

  • Leveraged Unity's Animation Rigging package to control KiBo's movements. Dealt with setting up the initial inverse kinematics and finding the best way to propogate changes to the targets position and rotation over the network. This involved a lot of minor tweaking after the initial setup, but was extremely rewarding once KiBo was moving how I intended.

Looking at another player's held item.

Networking

  • Setup a dedicated server using a static IP and Unity Relay to ensure players could connect 24/7 throughout the judging period of the jam.
  • Created a failsafe gamemode in case a player could not connect to the server to ensure players could still experience the game off of the internet.

Other Contributions

  • Implemented all player movement and unique object interaction system.
  • Setup camera transitions and cutscenes.
  • Created object centered puzzles with drop-zones and sockets.
  • Created additional shaders such as the ghost item.
  • Created additional VFX such as the torch fire and nirvana portal.

What I Learned

Caden and I had a bit less than a month to conceptualize and fully create KiBo, and the idea we set out to accomplish was one out of our comfort zone. Not being comfortable with multiplayer development, I pushed myself to learn how to use RPCs properly, how to set up a dedicated server, and how to avoid sending heaps of information over the network. We had some large issues during the last few days of development that was preventing the game from running over the network, but through thorough research and experimentation we pushed through and stabilized the project. This was also my introduction to the Animation Rigging package, which has been a staple when I need to create any sort of character that should react to the world they are in.