Dr. Bounce
ROLE(S)
General Programmer
Gameplay, Systems, Tools
ELEVATOR PITCH
A chaotic blend of FPS and pinball, Dr. Bounce is a fast paced shooter all about bouncing your gun. Play as Milo R.E Bound, a child scientist who must bounce his way through a slime infested lab to save his mother.
Project Background
Dr Bounce was the final project that I worked on for my studies at Falmouth University. The project spanned roughly 8 months and the team consisted of primarily previous team members from Culinary Coalition (another of my listed projects).
We aimed over those 8 or so months to create an enjoyable bite-size experience that would demonstrate our creativity and passion for game development. Our game was showcased at the Falmouth Uni Game EXPO in May 2022 and won awards for "Best Game Mechanics" and "Industry Vote" for best game at the event, voted on by industry professionals.
Gameplay Summary
Dr. Bounce is a fast paced first-person shooter in which you bounce the gun around the level to generate charge, which can be used to fire powerful explosive shots efficient at taking out slime!
In Dr. Bounce, explore the lab, making your way deeper and deeper into the mess you caused throughout 3 levels. Picking up more of your trusty inventions as you progress.
Learn the enemy types and figure out powerful bounce combos that will prove useful and satisfying to pull off!
Gameplay Summary
Dr. Bounce is a fast paced first-person shooter in which you bounce the gun around the level to generate charge, which can be used to fire powerful explosive shots efficient at taking out slime!
In Dr. Bounce, explore the lab, making your way deeper and deeper into the mess you caused throughout 3 levels. Picking up more of your trusty inventions as you progress.
Learn the enemy types and figure out powerful bounce combos that will prove useful and satisfying to pull off!
Contributions (Core Gameplay)
Dr Bounce was an extremely fun project to work on and also taught me some very important lessons. Most of my focus was on core gameplay systems for the project, with some of the key contributions I had being the systems and implementations of Custom Bouncing, Enemy AI / Projectiles, Gun Throwing/Catching, Magnet and Player Shooting. I also made tools for our designers to use to balance encounters and quickly create level prototypes making use of scriptable objects.
When we first talked about bouncing being at the core of our new game, I experimented with some prototype versions of what bouncing could look and feel like. Out of all of the systems I made for this project, this was by far the most fun, both to test and problem solve.
Originally this looked like the unity material system with the "bounciness" turned up to an 11 and whilst that was fun to watch, it wasn't really something that we could control or predict in order to build encounters around. My solution to this issue was to create a set of custom scripts to handle whether something is bouncy and how something would interact when it encounters something bouncy. This meant that I was able to allow for fine tuning on our encounters, having objects bounce in a predictable, consistent way, giving the player clarity on how they could interact with the world.
Contributions (Optimisations)
Due to the scale of our project and the number of assets we were using, we found it was of high priority to optimise the game wherever possible. This meant that throughout the project I got used to using profiling tools and running tests on our code to iron out expensive processes and reduce impact on performance in as many places as possible.
I also worked alongside our tech artist to contribute towards optimising our game through occlusion culling, making sure that art assets were rendering only when necessary and making this work in tandem with the enemy AI to ensure they were disabled/inactive when distant from the player based on what rooms were loaded/connected.
Iteration. Iteration. Iteration.
One of the reasons I love programming is the tangibility of what we create.
Experimenting. Testing. Testing some more.
Iterating. Repeat...
Dr. Bounce gave me endless joy whilst working on it, whether it was getting the gameplay just right to reach our vision or handing over new tools to our designers to watch them play with. At its core this game was our final chance to produce something that we could be proud of, but also a last chance to have fun with friends to create a wacky experience that our whole university and beyond could enjoy.
My thanks goes out to my wonderful team and the memories we made along the way.