GACHALYMPICS
ROLE
Gameplay Programmer
DESCRIPTION
Gachalympics is a series of 2-player athletics-based microgames multiple controls. Each player has 10 buttons that correspond to a different action and can wager their button controls. Inspired by Tenya Wanya Teens, the main controller is a self-made Arduino controller that is primarily buttons (although key accessibility is itch.io play). In a group of 3, I primarily coded all the mechanics, actions, and developed a UX environment to visually communicate to the player what was happening in a fast-paced environment. This project took three weeks to complete.
DEVELOPMENT
Jul-Aug 2024
GENRE
Party Game/Competiton
Platform
Itch.io
CONTRIBUTION
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Physical Interface Design: I helped integrate the UX of Unity development software with a physical Arduino controller and translated button commands to in-game actions. This was a unique experience in learning physical-interface prototyping and interaction-mapping with a custom controller.
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Control Flexibility: I structured the action code around bindings for both the Arduino controller and keyboard controls. This broadens the accessibility of our project to play settings that do not have access to our controller.
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Animation Synchronization , User Flow, and UX Comprehension: There are a lot of relationships that decides the animation played and agency of player input. I programmed all the individual actions/animations using C# and Unity's animation trees and developed a feedback loop using coroutines to optimize player input latency to sync players with the animation frame time. For the more combative actions, I again used coroutine systems to stun lock the players upon contact and set up a clear visual knockback indicator to let the player know of the stun lock. I learned a lot about real-time feedback design and how to program systems with multiple relationships and how to effectively communicate that to users.
