For the game Plunder's Call (Presented in the previous post) we needed the boat to follow a predefined path during the levels. In order to simplify and to make this task quicker for the designers I decided to create a tool in Unity.

First, I wanted to make a tool that can be reused with other objects than the boat and therefore in other Unity projects, even if the core can be reused on other engines.

This project brings me knowledge in tool development in general but also how to extend the Unity Engine editor. It also allows me to explore mathematic problems such as the Bezier curve and how to make a 3D object following it with his rotation.

Plunder's Call is a 4 players multi local coop party game in the same vain as Overcooked and Moving Out where the players are pirates that are plundering archipelagos in different kind of levels. Their goal is to organize and coordinate themselves in order to get a maximum amount of treasures.

This game was a school project made on Unity with two constraints. Only 4 months of production and no artists available on it. To overcome this, we get a budget of 70€ to buy assets.

On this project I was the only programmer. Which means that I worked on the controller, the local multiplayer, all the gameplay features (including Collision managment & physics), a pathing tool (which I present in detail in the next post) and assets, UI, feedbacks integrations...

This project was my first videogame production and the most complete project that I did on Unity. It helped me to better understand the engine with his pros and his cons (espacially the physic). Being the only programmer of a project was also enriching by the fact that there is no one to rely on when something goes wrong and that is how I learned most.

During the last entire year, I was working on a study of old 8-bit technologies.

For the sake of this study, I worked on the development of an A* pathfinding algorithm using C on the ColecoVision processor (the Z80). The challenge of this project was to put such a complex algorithm on 1kB of RAM.
This project brings me a certain mastery of the C language especially in optimization. For example, replacing arrays by just several bits and manage them using bitshifting in C.
To give a simple explanation, the main optimisation of the project was that the map was divided in a grid of nodes, each node has all his attributes on 2 bytes, as shown on the image below:

Thanks to this solution, I could save a lot of memory and I manage to run this pathifinding algorithm on this hardware.

I also managed to realize some tests using the Assembly language to compare the performances of the two programs. Unfortunately, I didn't had enough time to finish this project. Nevertehless, I had enough resources to complete my study.

This project was to create a Immersive Experience prototype for the Scottish Crannog Centre in partnership with my school (University of the West of Scotland) when I was in Bachelor of Science.

The Scottish Crannog Centre is museum and a archeologist association based on the story of Crannog (artificial island that were built during the prehistory) at Lock Tay in Scotland. Due to the sanitary crisis, the centre asked us to make an protoype in order to immerse the user in a prehistorical world and narrate the story of the Crannogs, the residents and all about the terrestrial but also aquatic fauna and flora.

We were two to work on this project during one month.

For this prototype, we have decided to go on a narratice experience where the user will be immersed in a small open world which can be discovered by exploring it.

This project couldn't be finished because, unfortunately, the Scottish Crannog Centre was the victim of a fire and only thanked us for the work that has been done.