Aaron Smit

This was my major games project for 2017 in which our team had six weeks to work through alpha, beta and gold. PlunderSail is a 3rd Person Pirate-ship game with a focus on constructing your ship almost any way you want with the goal of crossing each pirate island off your map. Our team consisted of five members, two designers, two artists and myself as the sole programmer. As the only programmer I was responsible for planning, prototyping and implementing all game features, an important part of this was communicating with the two designers to ensure the project was on track time-wise and that features worked as expected.

The main challenge I faced during this project was being responsible for everything code related. My time management skills were put to the test as I had to plan out my time to research, prototype, implement features and bug fix. My daily tasks included stand up meetings to stay up-to-date with the team, source control management and regular discussions with the designers on how features would work.

The features I implemented are as follows:
- A grid based building system around the ship which allowed players to place different parts within a ruleset.
- Configurable AI that allowed the designers to create several behaviours such as passive merchants who would flee or typical enemies.
- UI transitions and controller compatible menu.
- ship and camera controls.
- object pooling and other optimisation systems.
- combat systems such as cannons and dropping mines.

A 2D physics engine written in C++ using AIE's framework to handle input and graphics. The physics system was written from scratch and designed to minimize inheritance and maximize optimisation. The engine supports both static and dynamic objects which can be represented by any primitive shape or convex polygon. A quadtree and primitive bounding shapes are used for efficient early exits in collision detection.

   

Before Training                                                                          After Training

A demo simulation in which feed forward neural networks are represented by entities which can detect food infront of it with five raycasts seperated by 15 degrees with each raycast's output being the neural network's input and are awarded points for each 'food' consumed. Using my genetic algorithm library multiple generations of these entities are bread using their fitness, with each new generation having a higher sucess rate than the previous. The outcome is that hidden layer in the neural networks become tuned to solve the situation of hunting down food.

   

The goal of this project is to create maps for a turn based pirate/trading ship game, with this in mind the requirements are:

• large ocean areas for players to navigate.
• Islands to add interest to an empty ocean and house trade ports.
• Coastal focused land masses ranging from small to medium in size.
• Have a hexagon based grid look less rigid and more natural.
• Generate the map data separate to the visuals data.

The is map generated in several steps:

1. cellular automata to create initial clumps of land (landmasses) and water.
2. Flood fill until each tile belongs to a landmass or body of water.
3. Remove all bodies of water below a specified size, I only want playable bodies of water not lakes.
4. Remove excess beach tiles that spand too far from landmasses.
5. Remove any land masses smaller than specified size, one tile islans aren't fun.
6. Finalise tiles to ensure they are the correct type.

This is an ongoing project.

Global GameJam page

Windows: Download
Android APK: Download

The game has players solve puzzles by giving a robot a list of instructions which it passes on to any other robot it collides with.
I was responsible for:

• Timed cyclic movement for the robots, all active robots would move one block in unison.
• UI: the player could enter commands with the arrow keys or by clicking the corresponding button. Commands could be removed by clicking on them.
• Robot interactions with the world, such as colliding with walls and passing over buttons and the console.