BlankSlate

BlankSlate is a top-down stealth game where the main character has a device to mind control others, and use them as pawns. The device they use for this was an experiment, and will be used for no goods. The main character keeps it, and uses it against the creators to prevent their plans from being executed.

Development time September 1st, 2015 – present
2-3 days a week
Main role Feedback System / UI Programmer
Team size 34 Tools used Unreal Engine 4
Visual Studio 2015 (C++)
Department size 7 Personal Main Objective To build flexible mechanics for the designers to tweak

For this project I mostly worked on the camera movement, menu flow system, focus mode, and conversation system.

In the following video you can see how the camera behaves when navigating the level. The camera can be moved with the WASD and Arrow keys, rotated with QE and the middle mouse button, and zooming in can be done by scrolling. The camera has a focus point, or pivot point, that will always be near the center of the screen when the camera is used. The white lines visualize the mesh that it navigates over, which is generated during runtime. To generate it, is picks the 3 closest points to the pivot point inside a box twice the size of the navigation grid. From the 3 selected points it calculates the Barycentric coordinates from top-down view, and uses these coordinates to calculate the correct position of the pivot. With this method navigating will be smooth, no matter when an area is float or sloped.

For the conversation system I made a system that loads sequences from a CSV file, and can trigger conversations by calling a name. Each line in the CSV has information about which character is saying what. When a conversation starts, some events are triggered to control the flow. For example one for when a conversation starts, when a new dialogue is opened, and when the conversation has ended.

I will continue to work on this project, more focusing on UI for now. The main menu still needs to be made for the most part.