In Harmony
A Game about Harmonizing with the environment around you
In Harmony is a rhythmic adventure about achieving unity with the world around you. Play as a dancer who develops a special affinity with a mysterious beast, which will help her unravel the disappearance of her mentor. Use dance moves to affect the environment, overcome challenges, and follow the beat of the world within the ancient ruins of a legendary proving ground.
Duration :
Responsibilities:
- Implemented highly extensible and tweakable gameplay systems on UE4 C++ that can be extended and overridden in Blueprints.
- Designed and implemented multi-state AI for the final boss of the game using Behavior Trees.
- Organized meetings to convert ambiguous playtesting feedback into concrete programming tasks, boosting the production and iteration of player-oriented features.
- Mentored and aligned the programming team to a clean and maintainable architecture via weekly “Rubber Ducking” meetings.
- Promoted the usage of a Continuous Integration system, which drastically reduced the number of bugs and encouraged early bug detection.
- Created a playtesting pipeline that defined “player experience” via different sources of data, which empowered the design team to balance mechanics driven by player experience.
- Introduced an animation retargeting pipeline that unblocked the animator from reworking the entire set of animations for every change in the rig.
Boss AI Implementation :
I worked with a teammate to make the boss AI for the beast that Diah encounters on the proving grounds. Among the parts I implemented were:
- A behavior tree that has an observation state and an attacking state that are chosen based on cool-down timers.
- An attack state that triggers short and long range attacks depending on the distance to the player
- A step back mechanism that re-positions the beast body when the player is walking around its rear body.
- All of the attacks being performed on the beat of the music.
- An observation state which consists of chasing the player if far away and menacingly going around them after attacking.
A closer look at the behavior tree:
Visual Target Proposals:
I worked on the set dressing, lighting and post-processing of 4 proposals for the visual target for the game considering 4 different aesthetics. The first one was chosen by the faculty advisor as the final visual target for the game.
