Natural Disaster is a game that was inspired by the butterfly effect. In it, you play as a butterfly where you can interact with various elements of a scene to cause comedic moments of chaos. It is set in a lens of a View-Master, and you can switch between seven different scenes to find many characters and items to play with.
This was my Capstone project in college and was prototyped out alongside 15 other games. It was made using Unreal Engine 5. Our team had 13 people and I was one of three engineers. For the prototype, I worked on the visual effect of switching between scenes, with the goal of emulating the View-Master. While I had worked on games with teams before, this was the first time I got to work with other engineers. That ended up being one of my favorite parts of the project. Gaining different perspectives on how to tackle a problem and being able to bounce ideas off of people who are familiar with this corner of development was something I truly appreciated and enjoyed.
When the prototyping phase was finished, my team presented our prototype alongside the other 15 games. Half of the prototypes were cut and ours made it. The teams who didn’t make it were dispersed among the eight remaining projects, and our team size grew to 29 with a new total of 7 engineers to work with. At that point I worked on a large swath of tasks, including bug busting, monitoring and improving performance, implementing tools for designers to take advantage of, helping team members with tech issues and many other brief but useful items.
One example of my development process is the scene transition, a piece which I continued to develop and iterate on as we built the game. I had gotten my hands on a View-Master and referenced it while I worked, however I came across the design issue of realism vs playability. A realistic effect would have two images starting at the top and bottom and meeting in the middle. A playable effect would be a simple horizontal transition, and would provide players an easier mental map of our game; which scene is next to what, etc. It would also allow us to imply where NPCs may show up when they exit a scene: if they exit to the right, they may show up in a scene that’s to the right of the current scene. The benefits of the playable scene transition became more apparent to me as we play tested, and the final version of the transition is a horizontal one.
