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Start Date
Dec 2024
Student Project
First Person Boomer Shooter
Finished Date
Mar 2025
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 publically enjoyed game; incredibly impactful in my growth and understanding of 3D shooters and game development as a whole. I specialized in programming the players gameplay and designing both player and enemies systems; as well as experience creating tools for designers and other odd jobs or bug fixing that really strengthened my understand of Unreal Engine 5's Tool.
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My Roles
Technical Designer: Implemented Diagetic UI Shaders, Scriptable Events, Fracture Destructables, FMOD Audio, Lighting, Dialogue and Menu UI,
System Designer: Co-designed and Implemented Frogs and Freedoms core game loop, including level design, combat design, enemy behaviour design, gameplay systems, pickups, and all objectives.
Gameplay Programmer: Co-designed and implemented all player side functions from combat to movement and other interactions like collision, pick ups and damage.
Combat Designer: Built and balanced enemy encounters with various distinct enemy types, using system made by team, with encounters designed to keep the player moving and in the air.
Player Scripting and Design
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 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. One of our central pillars was around the idea of always trying to keep the player airborne. Higher speeds and higher altitudes should give the player an advantage in commiting maximum destruction. We followed this design by choosing to making the pogo jump capable of launching or squashing the frogs beneath it, before flying back up into the air. This way players could use their momentum to fly in on a crowd and get out without losing speed.
Rocket Jumping Alpha
The pogo jump allowed the player to reach great heights without changing the direction they had to face, so they could 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 both jumps one after another off of surfaces to rapidly gain momentum.​
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Shaders
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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