Superior Internship

For the internship I had during year 4 at BUas, I joined a company called Drifter Entertainment and worked together with them on their latest game called Superior. I mainly helped with AI-related issues, but I also took part in fixing issues for characters that haven’t come out yet. I also helped with some smaller issues that I will go more into detail about later.

In the first part of my internship, I reworked the robots that the boss Wind-Up spawns. Especially how they worked when attacking the character called Murmur. There were some issues with the invisibility and clones that are inherent to that character. Beyond that, I added a feature in animation, where the top half always stays focused on the enemy it is focused on, even if the character moves after doing the pathfinding.

After that, I worked on debugging tools, together with the AI lead Paul Renton. He set up the ImGUI window environment, after which I applied the spawner information to a window to allow the designers access to see what has happened with all the spawners in a level. This helped solve several issues, one major issue it solved is a spawning issue on a level that has been released with the Head in a Jar update.

The next thing I worked on was helping the design team focus on fixing the character named Renegade. Some parts of his kit were redesigned and implemented by designers. While a programmer had done a quick pass of the kit before that. I was tasked with finding and resolving the issues, as they were blocking the progression for the design team regarding game balance. Together with Gwendolyn Thompson, I fixed the issues and changed how certain things worked so she could then balance the character appropriately.

The last major issue I focussed on was traversal issues. We had an automated system to create links between areas that mobs in the game could use to move e.g. a jump link. That automated system, however, didn’t take geometry into account in several areas. Also, the jump itself was flawed because of a mistake made in the physics of the jump. The programming lead didn’t want to redo the entire jump link physics since the game had already been released. Instead, I was tasked with finding the broken links and fixing them by either moving, removing, or changing the jump mechanic slightly.

In between the major things I worked on smaller issues, for example, for a small period I worked on the turrets and clones of Murmur, where the trace for aiming went to an incorrect area on the enemy they were aiming at.

Overall, the internship was pretty good for me. It allowed me to work on the parts that I was the weakest at, namely my communication and rapid switching between work.