Jonathan Umar-Khitab

Overview

A 2.5D platformer where you play a young girl named Arenea as she searches for her parents while avoiding the inhabitants of the home they are staying in. Inspired by the Secret world of Arrietty. This game features platforming, and a create your own platform mechanic through the use of pins that you can throw into walls and use as makeshift ledges.

My role on this project was as the Lead Designer, supporting gameplay programmer, and technical artist handing rigging and animation for our Main Character and Enemies.

This project was created in my 2nd year of universtiy, with other 2nd year students on our own custom built C++ Engine. We were selected to represent our school at the LevelUp Student Showcase. There we the game was available to be played by the public, and was later showcased out our university’s open game developer showcase GameCon.

Project Goals

• Design a game around the theme of little people living in secret inside a house of humans.
• Develop a simple AI utilizing A* and dijkstra’s pathfinding algorithims.
• Build a custom in house engine utilizing c++ and opengl, utilizing deferred rendering and various other effects.
• Learn how to make 3D game ready assets.

Responsibilities

• Character concept art, model, and textures for Main Characters Mother.
• Rigging and Animation for Biped Humanoid character and Monsters.
• Providing programming support for our lead programmer, through pair programming, debugging, feature adjustments and other supporting tasks focusing around gameplay and mechanics.
• Sound design for objects, characters and assets in the game.
• VO for ghost character and VO director for female actress.
• Dialogue and Narrative, Atmosphere.
• Level Design, Concept, build, test, iterate.
• Opening and Ending Cutscene storyboarding and rendering
• Build an FMOD wrapper and integrate it into our custom engine.
• Build shaders in GLSL, utilzing Bloom, motion blur, shadow mapping, deferred rendering and others.
• Lead project team members to recover from negative situations, and ensure project was brought back on track and completed in time.

Additional Details

• Genre: Sidescroller Platformer
• Language: C++, GLSL
• Duration: January 2014 – April 2015 (4 Months)
• Platform: PC
• Controls: Keyboard, Gamepad

Detailed Work

• Characters
  • Main Character (Biped Custom Control Rig featuring hair, dress, facial setups, Animations (Jump, Walk, Jump, Death, Fall), Sound Design, Vocal Direction, Writing).
  • Mother Character (Concept Art, Model, Textures)
  • Dust Bunny creature (Control Rig, Animations)
  • Brother Character (Voice, And Writing)
  • Ghost Character (Voice, and Writing)
• Design
  • Concept Level Layout, build and testing.
  • Level Challenges, Traversal, Pacing, UX
  • UX Design
• Programming (C++ / GLSL)
  • UI
  • Jumping Mechanic
  • Bug Fixing and Quality Control
  • Mel Scripts for Maya
  • Shaders (Motion Blur, Bloom, Mesh Animation, Deferred Rendering, Shadow Mapping)
  • .Obj Loader, Binary Loader, OBJ to Binary Converter.
• Writing
  • Narrative Design
  • Dialogue and Barks