Bloodsport is a third-person single player arena combat game built in Unity for PC. Players take up weapons and magical abilities to fight combatants in a variety of levitating arenas. Pleasing the crowd and defeating foes grants gold to upgrade weapons and abilities.
Working in Unity as part of an eleven person team over a four-month development cycle, Bloodsport gave me a great opportunity to learn about the programming and broader game development challenges larger projects face by applying what I had learnt about incremental development using agile.
My responsibilities and contribution to this project were:
- Creating and iterating on a third-person character controller
- Implementing functionality for a range of different player spells and abilities, environmental events and their visual effects.
- Developing three AI opponents with unique attack and movement patterns
- Working closley with our animator to implement and interface animations with scripts using root motion and Unity’s Mechanim System.
- With with three artists, two designers, a writer and a sound designer to implement and maintain assets in engine.
- Lead and track work hours and project progress as scrum master for two sprints.
The contribution to Bloodsport I am most proud of was my work on the three enemy AI characters. Realising the emphasis on AI complexity in a third-person one-vs-one fighting game, I learnt about and developed dynamic finite-state AI systems for the three combatants. Allowing them to dodge, chase, flee, and perform unique abilities utilising root motion and animation events in my first attempt at programming characters for 3D.
Another great source of experience gained from this project is in structure; both of C# and Unity projects. As this was the largest project thus far, scripts needed a robust framework for scripts to communicate and all three programmers adopted a ‘Manager-of-Managers’ hierarchical structure to maintain clear and readable functionality. We were able to create and make use of a fluid workflow that minimized departmental dependencies and allowed for rapid implementation of assets, something I would aim to achieve with all future projects.
Overall, Bloodsport was a great project, the team had a great dynamic; sharing multidisciplinary knowledge, experience and a laugh building a game we’re all proud to have worked on.
Rory O'Dwyer 