Jade Spooner
Contributions
Being the secondary programmer on Outcasts (the primary being the project lead himself) was my largest contribution to a project up to that point.
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I made my first major foray into tech art and tool coding as well by programming Ashe and Tinker's tails. I wanted to create a visual element for the player that made the movement feel smoother even if nothing was mechanically added. I thought of Rain World's slugcat body and Celeste's hair adding to their game feel. It first required a Unity tool to create Bezier curves within the line renderer. Then, additional code was required to move each section of the tail to its initial "preferred" position. Making it flow naturally behind the player while still attempting to "bounce" back to its original position was one of the hardest things to get correct.
I also coded more core level components, beginning with buttons and doors. In order to decouple the activator and activated objects, I used an observer design pattern to allow the button to activate whatever objects are designated to be listening to it. To make it easier on the level designers using the prefabs, buttons and other objects have IDs that can be input by the designers to designate which objects are associated with each other.
The most complex level component to code was the air vents. Air vents needed the ability to share a total amount of power between each other. When one turns off, the others redistribute the power. It took multiple ideation cycles to figure out the best code design, but I'm very proud of the final version.
