Tom Black

Description

Welcome Employee to Atlas Co.'s Salvage & Retrieval Division.

A Single Player Survivor Horror game tasking the player with retrieving treasures from a variety of underwater Research Facilities, while avoiding the horrors within.

Explore the abandoned facility
Retrieve lost items
Avoid the monster that roam through the halls
Escape back to your ship and make some money!

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What did I do?

I was one of two game programmers as well as a game designer during pre production. In the beginning I designed and documented features such as facility generation, enemy AI / behavior tree, and the suit station.

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Procedural Facility Generator

Once production started I built the procedural facility generation system within the first 2 weeks with inspiration from Lethal Company but without any real information online I had to create my own unique solution. Using a room based generation approach made the most sense as we had a dedicated level designer on our team and this system would allow for full control over room design, size, and orientation.

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Facility Generator optimization test with 2000 rooms (2-3 seconds)

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Behavior Tree

The next feature I built was our custom node based behavior tree system. I did not design it to be a visual system as that would have been an unnecessary use of time seeing as no designers would be using it. The system is relatively simple but allows for various nodes such as root nodes, control flow nodes, and execution nodes (tasks).

Once the behavior tree system was setup I then went on to setting up our main enemy, the Angler Fish. I first created all the necessary nodes for the enemy design then linked them up in the enemy behavior tree. The Angler Fish behavior is quite standard and work like this: patrol -> chase -> attack -> cooldown -> search.

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Challenges I faced

My biggest challenge was my 1 month absence. I underwent 2 surgeries causing me to miss half of my development period and greatly set back my goals. Initially I was only expected to miss 2 weeks and I had planned for that, but that extra 2 weeks was allocated for the behavior tree system and caused a huge roadblock in our development time.

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How I overcame those challenges

I overcame this by planning around the expected 2 week absence and adapted to the unexpected 2 weeks by cutting unnecessary features and working more hours to allow for us to hit our deadlines with the behavior tree system, therefor saving us from falling behind on schedule.

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