Zackary Henderson
Technical Designer
Game Trailer
Hyper Vital is a first person puzzle game set on the space station Persephone orbiting Titan. Persephone has recently been invaded by a hostile life form known as the Xenoflora, which has infested the ship with it's alien plant growth. As the last survivor the player will have to destroy the Xenoflora's heart and send a distress signal if they ever hope to escape. With no weapons the player will have to use a variety of tools to save themselves.
One of the big features of Hyper Vital is that there is a state system that all gameplay objects have that determines certain behaviors of said objects. For example, a plastic object won't inherently conduct electricity. It will be conductive when wet, but the if the object gets hot enough the water will melt and the object will no longer be conductive.
Created Level Building Tools
I created tools using blueprints to let our designers quickly build levels for testing. These were used to quickly setup a level instead of tediously hand placing or referencing all the assets manually. Since xenoresin puddles and wires are both big components of the game's puzzles we needed to be able to iterate puzzles quickly.
Xenoresin Puddles
Xenoresin puddles are environmental objects that can be used as puzzle elements. They insulate whatever they touch from being lit on fire. They can be used to create a chain of fires or erode break metal objects like doors if they are touching it for long enough.
Xenoresin Tool Demonstration
Xenoresin Tool
This tool lets designers quickly place a series of xenoresin puddles in a level using placement nodes. The nodes can be placed and move independently with various individual settings. If the trail of xenoresin puddles are not set as finalized on play they will be deleted at the beginning of runtime so they are not left in the map.
Exposed Settings:
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Puddle size
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Number of extra nodes
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Whether to spawn extra nodes
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Custom number of puddles in between nodes
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Whether to use a custom number of puddles in between nodes
Wiring
There are objects that need to be connected to a power source to perform their function. The objects and sources are connected by a series of wired nodes that track where they are in the chain.
Connecting a power source and object
Wiring Tool
Since the process of connecting objects to power sources was very tedious I made a tool that allowed designers to quickly wire together objects to let them iterate on puzzles much faster. The main benefits of this tool were:
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The designers could test out the wiring in play mode before they make a final decision on the wiring.
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If the designers was satisfied they could stop working on one chain of wire nodes and start a new set of wires using the same actor.
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The wiring tool will delete itself at runtime so it doesn't remain in the scene if it isn't deleted.
Features:
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Highlights nearest valid object in range
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Adjustable search radius
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Smart selection of valid objects or manual control of what type of object should be grabbed
Implemented an Object State Calculator
I implemented the state calculator that maintains objects state. This includes eight attributes that determine an objects behavior. It takes into account an objects inherint properties, e.g. metal objects cannot burn, but are inherently conductive. This allowed us to create child blueprints that did not need to override any logic of the state calculator.
The Object State Calculator Event Graph
Worked on Mechanic Design
I contributed to the core game systems of the game and moment to moment gameplay. The application of the state system in gameplay scenarios was my primary design responsibility. The following considerations were used to focus the design:
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What was the player objective?
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What type of systemic interactions were possible in the game?
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How much mobility does the player have?
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Does this match the theme of the game?
I was also in charge of inventory design. It changed a few times, but the key pillar I was designing around was that players had to be forced to make decisions regularly due to resource limitations.
Created a Metrics Playback System
Early in the project I created a playback system of what happened during the course of gameplay. Each object that was to be recorded would store relevant values (transform, health, state information, etc.) in a set of structs with a time stamp. The user had a slider at the bottom of the screen that would allow them to scrub through a given gameplay session. Objects would have all their properties they did at that point in the gameplay session so that the team could go over playtesting sessions to see what users did.
Wrote Documentation for Level Building Tools
After finishing the wiring tool and the xenoresin tool I immediately wrote documentation for the designers. The documentation included:
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Basic overview of the tool
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Setup
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What other actors were needed to actually use it
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The limitations of the tools
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All the options and toggles the tools had built in
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Videos and gifs demonstrating how to use them