Oct, 2020 - Nov, 2020
SkyMachine is a semi-open world adventure game with and for children. This was a project that was in collaboration with MyMachine. They helped us get acquainted to a classroom of children with various disabilities. As an individual that's also in the grey zone for ASD, this was quite the challenge. We visited the children and had them draw up their own inventions and implemented them into the game. For a detailed development timeline, you can visit this page.
I worked on several iterations for the Waterpup 2000 shooting mechanic. This would be used to shoot water bubbles in the form of a dog to destroy enemies with it. Initially, I went for a different kind of camera view, but as it felt off I went for a over-the-shoulder style shooting instead.
I worked on the on-the-rails tank minigame which had you drive a tank where you needed to aim to shoot burgers and the burger-spawning machines with pancakes. Quite the amount of time was spent on making sure the level design worked, tweaking the difficulty and making sure the controls worked as expected.
The cleaner box was a companion that would pick up coins for the player. It had a rather simple navigation (using navmeshes). As it couldn't follow the player everywhere, a teleport functionality needed to be implemented. Initially we had more planned for the companion, but we had to lessen the scope as there were many inventions.
While we did have some code already for enemy behaviour, I wrote it in a re-usable way so there wouldn't be any differences and we could tweak it all at once.
In-between programming work, I started tweaking the lighting for the game to give off a bright, yet cartoon-y vibe. Later on, I also added a cartoon-y skybox to further the vibe.
Once the artists were done creating the UI textures, I worked on implementing it for the inventions I worked on. The "Tekenherkenner" was mainly UI-based so I could finish it up. I also worked on implementing the tutorial UI and videos.
The biggest struggle with SkyMachine was trying to finish all the inventions. We tried our best to give each invention a meaning and to not be useless in the end as we wanted to make each kid happy with their invention. For one of the shops, due to limited time, we turned it into a little mini-figure shop where they could buy little wooden versions of their inventions that they could take a look at the big MyMachine robot in the center of the map.
As we went for a semi-open world and had to target rather low-spec machines, performance was a struggle until the very end of development. In the polish phase we focused incredibly hard on tweaking LODs, grass distance, texture sizes and a lot more.
