Demo Trailer
Process Work
Experience Gained
Clickteam Fusion 2.5+
Working on Ooga, I became incredibly proficient at programming in Clickteam Fusion 2.5+.
Due to engine limitations, I had to develop proprietary tools in order to share the workload with my colleagues. I had to create a level editor from the ground up to my artist's specifications (5 visual layers, 1 collision layer, 1 hazard layer) and I had to develop techniques for tileset reordering, rotation of tiles, and many other things that game engines generally handle for game designers. As a result of this work, I've gained very useful programming experience and problem solving skills that I wouldn't have in another software suite.
Adobe Suite
I used Adobe Illustrator to create vector art of Sam's original concept for the steam banner. I took my vectorized version of his art, separated the elements and used those to create the 3D final shot of the trailer in Adobe After Effects.
(See trailer above at 0:53)
Version Control
The level repository for the team allows team members to pull the repo at the beginning of a work day and instantly see any changes made reflected in the game without downloading a new build. Clickteam Fusion 2.5+'s large monolithic project files are incompatible with version control, as the files quickly fill up a free cloud repository. I resorted to keeping the project file itself in a separate, locally stored (and frequently backed up) repository. The level repository made it easy for the team to pull, build, and push a new build to steam for testing without any actual involvement in the process of getting the levels into the build.
Jira
Shedcat Games' artist, Miro Dossmann, resides in Germany, while the remainder of the team is in the eastern standard time zone. This 6 hour time zone difference lead to significant communication problems. Due to this, I introduced the team to Jira. This was used to assign tasks at our meetings, so that nobody would ever be unsure of what to do. This also allowed us to effectively plan our sprints and track our progress.
Key Takeaways
I believe that what is best shown here is my ability to adapt. I taught myself how to use Adobe Illustrator and After Effects in just a few days to greatly improve the quality of our artwork. I figured out how to develop proprietary tools in engine, and how to program complex platforming movement with no tutorials (since the engine is so sparsely documented) I figured out clever ways to work version control into an engine that was never designed for it, and I taught my team how to use both version control and Jira to improve quality of life and workflow, and reduce miscommunications and misalignments between working and cloud versions of levels.
Tech Showcase
