Game Programmer
Dead Pedal Drifting
Big, Stupid, Fun!
Technology: Unity
Date: Spring 2021
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This game was created during a production class in my spring semester, during my second year, at Champlain College. In this 2.5D game the player controls a car driving around a desert destroying other cars and collecting their scraps. After each mission, the player receives some money based on the difficulty and returns to the garage where they can buy new weapons, upgrade the car. change it's color and go on a new mission. My main focus on the game was working on the Garage, specifically the user interfaces. Focusing on the garage as our UI programmer freed up other programmers/designers to work the driving and shooting mechanics. The following trailer was released by the team's producer Thomas Charlton.
User Interfaces
As the player returned to the Garage after every mission I needed to be able to present the player with all of the information they needed: whether it be shops, quest board or anything else they could interact with. I needed to do this in a way which didn't either overload with information them or make it so difficult to notice they never used it.
When it came to the quest board, I needed to set up a way to appropriately translate any quest data, from our quest templates to our quest board. To do this I set the quest board so when you click on a quest it pulls up a little description of the job as well as the monetary reward for said job.
After a mission, the player would be left with currency in form of cash and car parts, this is where the upgrade shop came in with new weapons and boosts to car stats. For each stat we needed a way to set up the cost and how they scale (Upgrades). When it came to displaying the weapons in the weapon shop I projected an image of the weapon located in the Unity scene onto a material which was placed on the shop panels.
With all of the data being altered and added between the game scene the team needed a way to effectively transfer car stats and currency values between scene. Together with another programmer on the team we set up a way for the data to be easily read and written between during scene transitions. Each car and currency value had get / set functions which were called by a transition script at the beginning an end of each scene transition.
