FM HPE 102.4
TGA Project #7
Team of 18
15 weeks half-time
(300 hours)
C++/
Custom Engine
Placeholder trailer. :(
FM HPE 102.4 is the second game in our own custom engine, which we call FeatherEngine.
My contributions
In this project, I worked on the user interface, refining and polishing it from the previous project. Interacting with menus gives more feedback and simply feels a lot better. Beyond what was improved, I also implemented a subtitle system for the audio tapes the player can find.
Aside from the user interface, I also created a particle system editor that our technical artists could use to make their own particle emitters. Over the course of the project, I refined it based on feedback I received to make it more suitable for our needs. The emitter settings could be saved to a simple .json file and then imported into our engine and played through code, placed in unreal, or through the visual scripting system.
Some of the functionality of the particle editor.
The subtitle system in action, featuring speaker name and color-coded text.
What did I learn?
During this project, I made a few custom “formats”, with my .json files for subtitles and particle emitter settings. Over time I’d find plenty of flaws in them, or features that needed to be added. Backward compatibility was important so that an old emitter file or a comma missing in a subtitle file didn’t crash the game, but could instead alert us to where there might be a problem.
While this is something I “know”, actually having to deal with the issues that can arise from not taking it into account really drives home the point and will make me more cautious when doing similar things in the future.
