Slam Chowdah Studios

This was the "Dream Game" as many would call it, was, at inception, supposed to be a fighting game with customized movesets, elemental magic, and medieval weaponry. I would first tackle this vision with too much ambition for my level of expertise, initially wanting to create a custom engine for it. This would obviously prove to be overkill.So I settled with Unreal Engine, which had just dropped version 4, and decided to feel out the engine with some studies into 3D asset creation, and so I would be learning Blender alongside it.At some point in this journey, I wound up wanting to add platforming features such as ledge-grabbing and aerial attacks, but found that combined with the customized movesets and multitude of stances, accidental pitfalls became painfully common. Not to say it can't be done, just that it has to be done right.I wound up splitting this project in two. Elemettle would remain the original fighter concept, while another prototype, dubbed Tapped In, would fill the space of the platformer.Some of the key skills acquired from tackling this design would include 3D modeling, texturing, rigging, and animation, GUI design/development, Unreal's Blueprint script and IDE, particle systems, and storing data as a loadable resource.Other key takeaways were that scope creep is your worst enemy, be careful when fusing genres together, and to prototype new projects to gain more transferable skills.

Once I had accepted that I needed a diversity of topics and genres, I tackled a new design. One focused on the FPS perspective and vehicle physics. Wastelander Sim. The premise is simple: go out into the desert to collect scrap, then bring it back to the home town to turn it into gear, which will then help you collect more.It proved to be a simple enough task, other than the physics involved with a realistic offroading vehicle. I would wind up satisfied after a brief period of further experimentation.In the modern day, this design is being revisited in Godot, but was first done in UE4. The main goal this time was to learn how to collaborate with peers via Github. So, I rallied some friends I met while speedrunning who'd expressed interest, and we've set off to great success.Some skills developed while working on this would be physics work, lighting work, poly-budgeting in modeling, and teamwork.Other key lessons from these would be that it's a whole lot easier to stick to one project when you have a team as invested as you. Also that doing the same prototype in multiple engines is a worthwhile endeavor, and can give you a good understanding of various asset pipelines.

Prog is a caveman who would ascend humanity's tech tree of his own accord. This was initially started as a means to figure out procedural world generation, but I also discovered a great way to set up an item system along the way.Running through each tile at generation time can be a taxing affair, but if you juggle chunk size with view distance, you can land on optimized values for your situation. Running several noisemaps and other pre-baked heightmaps to read for each tile, to determine what tile to place. If it's hot and dry, make it a desert tile. If it's above mountain start elevation, make it a mountain. If the area is volcanic, generate lava at the highest points of the regional mountains. Tie certain minerals to elevation or volcanism, so you have to dig further into the mountains/volcanoes to find them. Does the tile have nearby saltwater? Run the algorithm for determining whether it's a sandy or rocky beach and flag it to periodically spawn stuff like driftwood, flintstones, and seaweed.The item system was fun to bring to life. You start, in Godot at least, by creating a new type of resource containing your base-level item info, such as its name, description, icon, flammability, etc. Then you make a sub-type of that item info resource, say minerals for example. You could then define a melting and boiling point, any other items it's composed of, and volatile reactions, etc. If you then go to make another item subtype for tool/weapon parts, you can then define head shapes, like for a hammer, axe, or spear, make a mold item to cast a mineral to, then put that loaded mold into a furnace sufficient to process it.In short, this was a very productive prototype. I learned not just procedural generation, but also a nice, easily-filterable items system, as well as continued to get familiar with the Godot engine.

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