Grim Junior

Unreal Engine 4.
8 weeks development time.
Gameplay & QA programmer.

Grim Junior is a game where you play as a cute kid grim reaper, and you have to traverse through the environment to capture souls into your vacuum cleaner. You move through puzzles by using a mechanic where you switch position between the foreground and the background.

This was our school's first assignment where we actually had to work interdisciplinary. As such, we first got put into a small team with only 3 to 4 people.

And we had to come up with concepts that we had to pitch to the teachers. Then the people from the red-lighted concepts were put in the teams of the green-lighted projects. This way, the teams slowly grew in size over time.

It is important to note that the red-lighted concepts were not necessarily bad, but most of them got seen as too ambitious as we were supposed to have a working demo at the end.

What is Grim Junior

My responsibilities

I joined this project around the middle of development as I worked on another red-lit concept before. As such, I took on a mixed role of gameplay and general polishing programmer.
By this, I mean that I implemented some new systems for the gameplay or expanded existing ones, but I also spend time polishing all kinds of aspects of the project.

Here is a complete list of everything I contributed:
- I added a finite state machine to the soul running from the player.
- This made tweaking the behavior of the soul easier for the designers.
- I fixed physics-related issues that came with the player holding up objects.
- I ensured that the game had support for both keyboard and controller.
- I added the functionality for objects that are in the way of the camera and
the player to go transparent.
- I added functionality for the player to get hit by bad souls.
- Added player being slowed down when using vacuum.