Summary

Game Project 2 at PlaygoundSquad by a group of 13 students consisting of designers, artists and programmers, developed for the PlayStation 4 during nine weeks.

Liberosis is a game of exploration. You will learn to traverse the levels with new mechanics introduced as you progress. Our main focus in the project was to have really good graphics and with that a lot of performance work was needed from us programmers.

We're so proud that our game made it to the final and recieved people's choice in The Rookies awards.

Programming Process:

The approach of the programming team in this project was very collaborative. We constantly helped each other and most game's systems have been worked on by all of us at some point or another. But there are a few things that I mainly worked on as one of the three programmers, these are listed below.

Main contributions:

Boids

The boids started as a personal project over a weekend but were later improved on and added to the game. Both the mantas and whales have similar functionality:

Basic boid behaviour (cohesion, alignment and separation)
Geometry avoidance
Player avoidance (only mantas)
Waypoints

Camera

The movement and camera is one of the main features of the game that had to feel good to make the game enjoyable. And therefore the camera has been worked on constantly, especially during the first half of the project. We have iterated countless times on the camera. And since this was my first third person camera in a game I have learnt a lot. I would of course like to have put more time into polish of the camera, but overall I'm happy how it turned out.

Save and Checkpoint System

Liberosis has a pretty lightweight save system. The data that will be stored on disk is the last checkpoint the player interacted with, the picked up collectibles and audio volume settings.

Audio

All the sounds where made by a team of musicians from Högskolan Dalarna. And I was the link between them and the game, implementing all the sounds using FMOD. Implementing transitions between music and custom audio triggers for different interractions with the player was a great learning experience.

Dithering

A shader effect I made to make meshes transparent using alpha clipping instead of using expensive transparency.