Thiefs Gambit
Software Used: Unity
Role In Project: Lead Programmer
Thief's Gambit is a Western-style VR shooter and puzzle game! Your job is to enter the bank and open the vault before the sheriffs and deputies know that you are there! When you open the vault you now have to fight your way out to safety with your loot! One of the goals of this game was that we wanted to push the art as hard as we could, to make it so that we had a game with fantastic art and fun gameplay.
This game was done over a course of 10 weeks a part of our final senior classes at Savannah College of Art and Design. There were a total of 7 other group members, with me being the Lead Programmer. My job was to direct the other programmer in tasks and to help out when he needed it. I was also in charge of meeting with the other leads and saying whether we could and could not accomplish proposed tasks and systems.
Destructables
Destructible Programming
In our game, we have some objects which when shot are destroyed, as in pieces go flying, such as a vase. This works by having a regular mesh and then a "shattered mesh," and switching out the mesh's when they are shot. The way the script works is that when the new Mesh is brought in, it gets all the children of the mesh, aka the different pieces, and adds a rigid body along with a force. This way we can easily implement the destructible without having to worry about adding the rigid bodies.
Challenges
Obviously one of the biggest challenges currently in VR is frame rate. We wanted to keep the frame rate as high as we could. This required heavy collaboration between the art team and the programming team. For my side, I wanted to make everything as modular and optimized as possible. Meaning that I had to always think about how often this object or script would be used. In the end, we kept our original goal and kept a steady fps of 120.
