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Student Project (5 Months)
Apr 2025 - Aug 2025
Tech
Unreal Engine 5 | Fork | Hack'n'Plan
Role
Gameplay Designer/Programmer
Theme
3D Single Player Movement Shooter
High Concept
Frogs and Freedom is a First Person Movement shooter developed by a team of five over the course of 4 months. Bounce off surfaces with rockets as you obliterate hordes of mutant frogs with explosions.
Frogs And Freedom | 2025 (5 Months)
Gameplay Programmer | Technical Designer
Frogs and Freedom was my second project while at Vancouver Film School, and my first project working in Unreal. I consider it to be my first appraised and enjoyed game and was incredibly impactful in my growth and understanding of 3D shooters and games as a whole. I specialized in programming player function and designing the players and enemies systems, and experience creating tools with designers and other odd jobs and bug fixing that I'll show below that really strengthened my understand of Unreals Tool.
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Player Systems
Early on, we came together with the idea of creating a game with an emphasis on movement in a 3D setting. we laid some restrictions on what we didn't want to see from this idea; namely a grappling hook, and got to work on the challenge. we landed on the dynamic of rocket jumping; a player interaction born from the push back of explosives in games.
The first challenge and most difficult challenge from this was designing movement that accomplished a couple hurdles intrisic to rocket jumping; like its accessibility, motions sickness, and skill requirement required to successfully gain distance and speed. To be part of our central game loop, we'd need to make moving about the level effectively simple and rewarding while still allowing for more advanced players skill expression to breathe.
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Rocket Jumping Pre-Production
The intial ideas we landed on began with testing direct changes to fix a problem and see how that makes it worse; "If aiming the rocket while moving forward is difficult, let them look in the direction they wanna go." "if getting the exact direction you wanna fly in is difficult, why not give them more strafe or an air dash?" We prototyped and playtested a lot early on to figure out what felt best for traversal before finally landing on something.
The problem with these intial ideas didn't allow the player to cleanly utilize traditional rocket jumping in tandem with them , either requiring more button presses or rapidly looking up and down. Taking a step back and considering our pillars, we decided on a "Pogo Jump" as our simplified rocket jump. During this we were still struggling to introduce one other system to our combat rather than just firing rockets at hordes. Some of our central pillar include the idea of always remaining airborne to be at an advantage and maximum destruction resulting from height that helped us make this decision.​
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The pogo jump allowed the player to reach great heights without changing the direction they face and continue focusing on the horde of frogs, while introducing a new gameplay element where the player could fall at an increase speed to slam the rocket launcher down ​on frogs and explode back into the air again. This synergized with the traditional rocket jump incredibly well allowing players to chain them of of surfaces to rapidly gain momentum or change direction​
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