Ylver Blum Buer – Portfolio

Synopsis

Help a forgotten toy navigate Santa’s workshop by solving puzzles, encountering dangerous defective toys to reach the sleigh 

Development

Lost Toy is a mobile game inspired by Lara Croft GO, created by a group of 12 students at TGA Malmö during 6 half time weeks. The mayor challenge during this project was to make the game run smoothly on an old iPad, which demanded lots of work spent optimizing and finding clever solutions to performance problems.

Contributions

In this project I'm most proud of the interactable ABC-block with arrows pointing in available directions. I created a system of raycasts and invisible walls to figure out what directions the block could be pulled or pushed and made the arrows appear/disappear accordingly. 

I also contributed by programming enemy movement and interaction. There are three "enemies" in the game: the nutcracker, the saw and the crocodile. The nutcracker and saw follow the same system where they move in a path from A to B that can be modified during gameplay. The nutcracker and saw will perform their movement after the player has finished their turn and if the player stands in their way it will be killed, forcing you to restart the level. In the example below the ideal way of solving the puzzle is to pull the purple lever when the nutcracker and saw are placed on the purple tiles, thereby moving the tile and hazerd out of the way and giving them no place to move.
The crocodile has a slightly different mechanic. If you intersect with it from behind or the side it can be destroyed, but if you walk directly in front of it's maw it will kill you. 

What I learned

During this project I increased my knowledge in Unity and C#. I also learned a lot about doing optimizations to increase performance, such as replacing the part of the 3D modeled background with a 2D image and culling while rendering models. I also gained a some new insights in how to use linear algebra and vectors to determine movement.