On The Brink
ROLES
Sole Programmer
DESCRIPTION
On The Brink is a first person action game I developed as a personal project for the Grads In Games Search For A Star Games Programming Challenge 2023 where it was declared the winner of that category. The player takes control of a lone astronaut on a spaceship as it attempts to return to Earth. They must evade missiles, defend their rover and gather resources in order to keep everything stable until they reach their destination.
YEAR
2023
Team Size
Solo Project
PLATFORM
Windows
Overview
On The Brink is a first person action game where the player takes control of a lone astronaut aboard a spaceship during its return journey to Earth. Chaos ensues and it is up to the player to ensure that missiles are evaded, enemy robots are defeated and fuel and resources remain stocked up. This project was developed for the Grads In Games 2023 Games Programming challenge which it ultimately won after being put before a panel of industry judges from XR Games, Free Radical Design, Bulkhead, Aardvark Swift and Furious Bee . For this brief, participants were given a starter project scripted using C++ and UE5 with the only stipulation being that they must not begin from scratch but instead adapt the existing codebase into a fully fledged game. The base project was a barebones spot the ball game where the player would simply guess where they think the ball is before finding out if their guess was correct or not. I decided to adapt this framework into a first person one with numerous minigames built upon the starter content I was provided with. Overall, I am extremely grateful for the oppurtunity to take part in this and am immensely proud of what I have produced. I picked up crucial skills such as the ability to take a project that had already been started by another programmer and seeing it through to completition by adjusting to their coding style.
“Luke showed excellent planning but was also flexible in that they took on feedback from peers and made changes to their project. His coding skills were exemplary, neat and tidy. When asked questions, he were able to relate them all back to the work they’ve done on personal projects and university projects.”
My
Contributions
- Read and Understood an existing C++ codebase before researching directions in which I could take the project.
- Adapted an existing C++ codebase into a completed game.
- Programmed a simple state machine for AI robots.
- Coded a planet surface minigame with flying and shooting complete with health and fuel systems.
- Adapted a spot the ball minigame into a missile dodging minigame complete with spaceship damage and VFX.
- Implemented a resource gathering minigame with different rates of spawn for each element.
- Dynamic UI Programmed To Display Indicators
- Audio Programming with spatialization and attenuation
- Game loop logic with multiple lose conditions and a win condition