Edwin Teoh
Cleanup Catastrophe is a 2D side-scrolling puzzle game where you play as a cockroach armed with his trusty vacuum cleaner, who is tasked to rescue his crewmates from the invading pirates.
This project was developed over a period of about 6 months with a team of 7 consisting of 5 programmers and 2 designers. As one of 2 people in the team that had been taught graphics prior to this project, I was assigned the Graphics Lead role.
Role / Scope of duties
Some topics that were covered as part of my Graphics Lead role are as follows:
2D Sprite Rendering
Editor Object Picking
Particle Systems
Gizmos & Font Rendering
The particle system extension of the engine was developed by me.
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This extension was developed because we wanted to give visual feedback after the player interacts with certain objects in the game. One area was the healing station. When standing on it, the station will emitting health particles to show the player that the character is being healed.
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After attaching the Particle Emitter Component to an entity within the ECS Engine, we gave the users the ability to spawn particles either along a line or within the radius of a sphere.
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Some other parameters were exposed to the users as well, such as the starting velocity, the variations of the velocity, starting and ending color and color, as well as the spawn rate and amount. We can also attach an image to it as shown in the image on the left.
Closing Comments
We probably did not reliaze it during the span of the project itself, but we were always constantly trying to give the player the experience of being a cockroach but there was a very fundamental obstacle that we did not overcome or notice it being there. It was the camera angle.
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Being a cockroach, some of the abilities that we wanted to empower the player with the ability to climb walls or to fit in tight spaces to navigate out of danger. These 2 things were especially challenging to do with a side-scrolling view. The depth perception was the obstacle that we failed to overcome, which could have been easily mitigated if the environment was in 3D but the challenge was pulling it off in 2D. Perhaps a 2.5D view would have been a better selection of the camera angle.
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My biggest takeaway was the importance of camera angles.
Credits
Yumi - Producer / Editor & Pipeline
Kevin - Tech Lead / Engine & ECS
Nazrul - Design Lead / Story
Yan yi - Level Desgin
Nicolette - Physics
Xinyu - Serialization & Gameplay