Demo Trailer
The Demo Release
In 2021, we effectively restarted the game from scratch. The movement object I was using for the platforming was closed source and had a number of fatal flaws that I couldn't patch. I had to make the movement engine from scratch, which took me hundreds of hours of trial and error to perfect.
December 2023, I took a trip to Sam's house to do some development in person, and we released the demo.
In less than a week, we amassed over 100 wishlists and players, and the demo was added to over 5000 steam accounts.
Experience Gained
Clickteam Fusion 2.5+
Working on Ooga, I became incredibly proficient at programming in Clickteam Fusion 2.5+. Due to the engine's limitations, I had to develop a number of proprietary tools in order to share the workload with my colleagues. For example, 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 many other game engines generally handle for game developers. 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.
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.
Clickteam Fusion 2.5+'s large single files for projects are somewhat incompatible with version control, since the duplicate files quickly fill up a cloud repository. For this reason, 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 me 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.
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 final shot of the trailer in Adobe After Effects.
(See trailer above at 0:53)
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
Process Work
Below are a number of examples of Miro boards to showcase the team's workflow and design process
