Gameplay Programmer
2024
Outlaw Heart is a stylized, fast-paced action game created by industry veteran Dave Hansan (MacabareMonster), whose work spans from the vibrant world of Puzzle Bobble VR: Vacation Odyssey to the competitive intensity of Riot Games’ 2XKO.
For this project, I assisted in optimizing performance through cleanup and profiling, in addition to implementing new gameplay systems and providing general consultation.
Gameplay and Code Refinements
As part of my work on Outlaw Heart, I was responsible for re-writing some key gameplay components to help with the game's stability, improve its performance and provide better options for scalability.
One of my primary tasks was rebuilding the game's Grapple System, which had suffered from inconsistencies and bugs that disrupted gameplay.
The new version was designed to be more reliable, allowing it to be used more easily against enemies and objects in a level.
Giving Room for Expansion
For refactoring focuses, I reduced the amount of code repetition between players and enemies, I introduced a base shared class with Players and Enemies, move systems like health in their own components, and leveraged interfaces to further share behaviour logic between interactibles and characters.
Additionally, I decoupled pre-existing gameplay systems to reduce dependencies, improved runtime efficiency and memory management, and cleaned up the code base.
Outlaw Heart was also built previously with a single playable character (Remy) in mind. I extended the existing systems to allow for multiple characters in the future.
