COMBINED ARMS
Description
​Combined Arms was my most recent project and the culmination of the lessons I’ve learned from my previous releases. The premise of the game is simple: a First Person Shooter wherein you hold every time you pick up a new weapon, you grow another arm to hold it. As the player naturally progresses through the game, their growing arsenal leads to increasingly comedic and ludicrous challenges. Combined Arms was made in two weeks as a part of the Seattle Indies Game Jam 2023. I acted as the lead gameplay and tools programmer for a team of six.
Reflection
Out of my published titles, I believe Combined Arms to be the greatest success. The simplicity of the premise helped guide the team toward a common goal. Combined Arms provided growth opportunities for me both as a creator and a collaborator.
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As a creator, I took the tools I learned from uncanny VR and used them as a framework to create memorable gameplay in Combined Arms within our time constraints. Using a procedural animation system, I was able to create a variety of enemies from our limited selection of art assets. Each enemy type could change its animation and behavior based on its equipped weapon. I also optimized the game’s physics system. Enemy ragdolls were loaded separately from the enemies. When an enemy was defeated, they were swapped out for a ragdoll that would receive force proportional to the final blow. All the while dynamically freezing and unloading expensive ragdolls in the background if the body count ever got too high. The result enhanced the power fantasy and comedy of the game while not compromising on performance.
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As a collaborator, I used the lessons from my time working on Shadow Punk Simulator to help guide development when there was confusion over the direction of the project. Our gameplay designer had originally drawn inspiration from gameplay-focused retro games. However, our level designer felt the game needed additional narrative direction. I thought that both perspectives were valuable, but that we would need to compromise to reach our deadline. So I took a diplomatic approach and Illustrated to the team the importance of maintaining scope. Together, we decided on a central strong theme of an art museum coming to life. The theme gave the project more narrative cohesion while saving development time. In the end, an empathetic and collaborative approach to project management enabled all parties to make their unique contribution to the project while keeping the scope in check.