Zentera

Team (16) 8 weeks C++ (Custom Engine)

Assignment

Zentera is a game made for a school project. It’s connected to 2 other projects I have done. It started with my voxel physics engine, from which the Kudzu engine was born. And then we were tasked to make a game with this engine. We were with a team of 3 designers, 9 programmers, and 4 artists. The biggest constraints of kudzu is small level sizes. So we decided make the game based on captain toad treasure tracker with a diorama camera. This is very similar to our demo game for Kudzu, so it made sense to go in this direction because the demo game worked pretty well.

Responsibilities

While working on Zentera I worked primarily as a gameplay programmer. My biggest responsibility was the player controller. Working on the player was partially done in scripting, and partly done in C++. Because at this point the engine had only a very basic scripting interface, most of my work was in creating functions in C++ that can be called from the scripting. Then from the scripting I can create the player controller and its behaviour, while exposing values for the designers to tweak in engine. I made the camera in the same way as the player with the exposed values for the designers to tweak. Because I was responsible of the player, I also had to connect all of the other behaviour to the player like the interactables. This was quite a challenge because I was working with other peoples code, but it worked out in the end. I also helped the designers with the engine, showing them how to add prefabs, and how to work with the in game interactables like the buttons, doors etc.

Result

In the end we won some reward on our school for Zentera, we won: year 2 best tech, year 2 best design and year 2 industry award. Although these school awards aren’t the most prestigious. It was still nice to know our game was the best one game from year 2. It was very interesting to work with designers and artist inside our own custom engine, because you work way more towards their specific needs.