Return to the Skyway is a puzzle-platformer game. My responsibilities on this professional student game project were broad. As the Technical Lead, faced with the challenge of directing the development a game engine, I had to set Coding Standards such as Style and API standards, conventionalize the architecture, and dictate which systems were necessary and how they would interact. On top of this, the engine needed a 2D rendering pipeline, which I developed in my secondary role as a Graphics Programmer. The pipeline was developed using OpenGL and required sets of tools for artists. The first set of tools were for importing assets such as Raster Graphics, Skeletal Animations, and Animated Spritesheets. The next set of tools were content generation tools such as the Particle System, Animation Rail System, and Post Processing Stack.

      To support our VFX artist, I developed a GPU based particle system using compute shaders in OpenGL 4.6. Stress tests found that the particle system could support as many as 20 million particles.

      To help our artists achieve the style they desired, I created a post processing system to handle various post-processing effects. However, the final release only included bloom.

      For our chase scene with the final ‘Boss,’ I created a rail system based on Bezier curves to animate the boss throughout the level. The rail system included events to trigger game logic and audio effects.