Technical Designer
Project Everglades
Technical Designer
Project Everglades is a synchronous, turn-based 1v1 competitive strategy game created in Unreal Engine 4 designed to be "played" by a.i. Working in partnership with Lockheed Martin over the course of 14 weeks with a team of 11, the goal was to add player functionality to the game to allow humans to play against a.i.
Updated and added to the existing user interface to show information about the game and allow the player to interact with the game state. Communicated with the tech department to connect the actual gameplay functionality to the user interface. Implemented a simple tutorial system.
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Updated UI
This is the original user interface which was used to view playbacks of generated a.i. vs a.i. games. As can be seen, the information visible to the player includes a countdown timer, each side's score, and each side's remaining units at the top. The current state of which side owns an objective can be seen in the bottom left.
This is the new user interface which displays even more information about the game state. This information includes the current command a group is given, displayed both below the currently selected group and on the right side bar, how much health a group has, the total number of groups taking a type of action in the bottom right, and what kind of units and how many of them are in a group.
The largest hurdle in displaying all the additional information was understanding how to make use of the existing code base to extend it to grab the extra information. After that, it was just a matter of finding where that extra information lived.
Player Interaction
Communicated with another programmer to make sure the correct information about the groups is set before communicating with the server (ending the turn) and updating the game state. As seen in the video, the player is able to select different groups and give them orders.
The problem here was taking apart the existing code to understand how the groups were being ordered and how their orders worked. This was to allow us to take advantage of what is already there and properly manipulate those variables with player input as to actually play the game instead of having to create new code, and essentially another game inside the game, in order for the player to play.
Tutorial
A simple tutorial implemented to introduce to the player information about the game and the process of how to give orders to groups in order to play the game. While the tutorial is ongoing, player input is limited until the action is introduced, as can be seen in the video. The tutorial also requires the player to perform the introduced actions (or skip the tutorial) in order to continue, making sure that the player (hopefully) understands enough about the game to play.