Overview
10 people
9 Months
UE4
C++
Summary
Líff is a project I love both for the big (and fun) technical challenges we had to overcome, and for the great and passionate people I worked with to create the game.
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The game was created for my final student project. It received the Grand Prix 2018 of my school, Isart Digital, from a jury of French professionals. After this success, the game is currently participating to international contests as a student project.
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To achieve this, even if we were supposed to work on the project 3 days every two weeks, we worked really hard during our free time to create the game we wanted.
The game
The game has a totally dynamic gameplay, where the player can paint and erase the 3D world around him in a totally open environment.
My work
For this game, I worked on multiple and very different features :
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The matter creation.
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The matter destruction with pre-computed chunk erasing. (another programmer worked on a version of the destruction with CSG, but the R&D took a too long time, and he sadly couldn't finish it in time to integrate in the game).
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A continuous integration system
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The developer side of the animations (IK, aim offset, blendings, gameplay integration...)
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Rendering/physics optimisations
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Some shaders (grass fading in front of the camera)
Technically
Three developers is a very small team to make a 40 minute game with two features never truly seen before. At the beginning of the development, no one really knew where we were heading with the concepts, so we had to discuss a lot what was possible, and what could be prototyped.
Any prototype and R&D task was very dangerous because it needed a full time developer during an unknown amount of time (roughly approximated at best) to do it, and we had to make a game, not just features. We had to do it though, so we worked with a lot of iterations to make the prototypes quickly available for the game designers, and to make sure it was interesting for the players.
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Because we were on pretty original features, we had to customize Unreal Engine 4 a little to make everything up and running. To unsure we didn't spend all our time in compilations, I made a continuous integration system with Jenkins and C#.
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Another difficulty was that the totally dynamic environment was a pain to optimise. From the lights to the physics, from the number of meshes rendered to the sounds (damn you, occlusion detection!). It seemed every thread was pulling down to 10 fps, so we optimised a lot of things at the end of the project. It was enough to get 30 fps for the targeted computers, but not for the average people machines.
Finally
This project shows exactly why I am a game developer : Technical problems to overcome (my developer dark side), creative ideas from talented colleagues, teamwork, hard work, and the will to create a great game. The game still has its problems, but with the time we had, I'm really proud of the result.
Hey!
It's Benjamin.
Thanks for looking at my website! I hope you liked my projects so far! I've done a lot of different things, and I used some cool stuff that you could try in your own projects. Don't hesitate to wander a little in the project pages!
If you have anything to ask me about or if you have some ideas to share, please do, I love chatting about technical stuff ;-) .