Virballs

Hats Worn: Tools Engineer, UI Designer, QA manager

Tools: UE 5, Blueprints, Steamworks SDK, Clickup

Team Size: 15

Time Frame: May 2024 - May 2025

Third person planet hopping action platformer with a focus on combining elemental baddies into Kirby-style weapons. You roll around like sonic, you fill out a pokedex of weapons, you can engage “ball mode”. I co-lead the design and development of the game as we took it from a prototype to a fully fledged title. Particularly I had a hand in many of the UI systems, procedural level generation, save data management, and achievements.

Particularly I had a hand in many of the UI elements of the game including much of the hud, shop interfaces, world map, and menus. The world menu in particular is something I worked hard on, with the UI matching up and moving to accommodate the solar system scene. One particularly difficult problem to solve was the behavior of the auto-aim reticle from a 3rd person perspective, which had to be careful not to aim at anything unintuitive from such a perspective.

I also created our hex-based procedural level system and created an interface for developers to test and tweak generation settings to their liking via data table and editor UI. Because this system drove the grand majority of gameplay it was a challenge to write code that ensured that generation would be valid regardless of the seed. For a similar reason, build accessible debug utilities for getting information about the generated level were very important.

Managing an Unreal project of this size on git was a new challenge for me. As the server administrator I slotted into helping artists and developers integrate with our workflow and resolve version control issues. In a similar manner I coordinated our QA workflow, maintaining a wiki of commands and guides and closing 200+ tickets during development.