Black Matter
Artist, Game Designer, Programmer
My Contributions
I wore a few different hats during this jam depending on what the team needed. My main role was the 3d artist on the team. While I am normally a programmer, it was fun to get outside my normal role into an area I am more novice in. Alongside art I had a blast working with the talented team!
Art
Most of the art was created using a Fortnite-style grid system standard in mind. All building blocks, piping variants, and doodads, were made to be all modular and easy to fit on a 256 unit grid.
I could make assets and hand them off with, supporting documentation to use the grid, to the dedicated level designer for him to easily place around the map.
One of the challenges I faced (besides being a novice and firstish time in ue5), was half way through on. My teammates had an awesome idea on how the black hole would consume the level, that would require me to remake all the building blocks, and I happily obliged.
Game Design
An example of a problem encountered during development
The black hole was supposed to be our main antagonist. this was not immediately apparent to (the) tester(s) and players wouldn't notice until the danger was massive.
My solution
I used the terminal that the player spawns in front of as my main point of reference. The black hole grew at a constant rate since game start, because of this the terminal only got sucked up after the player left the starting room and rarely returned cause there was no need to. I wanted the black hole to suck it up while the player was standing in front of it, so I changed it to grow in size suck up the terminal, then pause until it caught up to where it should be to not mess up my other team member who was focusing on balancing.
Conclusion
I nailed it.
During the playtest, She made the exact expression I had in mind when the computer got sucked up in front of her.
(Scenario shown at 0:17 - 0:27)
Programming
I was more of a secondary programmer on this project. I handled things like implementation of art assets that needed code, fixing bugs and, controller support.