Squids From Space

Squids From Space is an 8 vs. 8 online competitive top down asymmetric shooter in Unreal Engine 4. It started life as sort of a spiritual successor to Fat Princess, an earlier game Fun Bits had worked on, but quickly grew into its own.

I was deeply involved with this project since we started working on it (then a mothballed prototype) and was one of the primary programmers through the bulk of the project. In September 2019, I assumed the lead programmer role.

As we were a small team, I was involved with nearly every part of the development process. I worked with designers to implement and optimize complex gameplay and UI systems, extending engine features where necessary. I worked with artists and animators to implement and optimize graphics and animation systems. Additionally, I did a lot of work with our backend services, with support for persistent player state, game server validation, and analytics.

Most of what I was involved with was building in depth systems that would need to be fast and maintainable. This included a player cosmetic system to allow for large scale customization of player pawns, complex animation systems to smoothly blend between different player states, core UI frameworks, and an analytics system interfacing with Google Analytics to track gameplay statistics and session information. I also spent a lot of time refactoring, cleaning up, and optimizing large swaths of the project to make extending existing logic and modifying values more tenable.