Cubed
Programmer
Jan 2020 - April 2020
Cubed is a game created by BetaBytes, an 8 person team. The game was made in the Unity game engine. The game is about trying to escape from a lab with the help of a small, multifunctional cube companion.
In this project, I worked as a programmer in charge of all of the AI as well as some of the functions of the cube.
There are two basic types of enemies in this game, a standard enemy that patrols an area and attack the player if it sees them and a turret enemy that stands still but shoots rapidly at the player if they are within a certain range. The bullet they fire is a projectile that travels in a straight line towards the player. I had to make it so that throwing the blue cube was the only way to damage the enemies, but it only works while the cube is blue, not any other color. These enemies each took about 3 hours to program.
Shown here is the part of the script I wrote that makes the normal enemies patrol between a given set of points. This script also contains the shooting behavior and damage calculation.
One of the cube's abilities is to activate switches when in its green state. The way I programmed this is so the switch checks to see what color the cube currently is when it makes contact, and if it is green, then the switch calls a script that's attached to the door object that it's connected to, and that scrips raises up the door so the player can pass. The switch also changes color to indicate to the player that it's been activated. I worked on the scripts for this mechanic for 4 hours.
Another cube ability that I created is the ability to freeze moving platforms when the cube is purple. This mechanic presented the most challenges for me in the entire project. The platforms move based on a lerp function that calls upon delta time, so while the platform is frozen, I had to create an timer to to record how long the platform has been frozen. This timer is subtracted from delta time so that the platform resumes movement from its current position instead of jumping ahead.
Another challenge was the physics system itself. The cube has to maintain contact with the platform to keep it frozen, but often the act of freezing the platform would dislodge the cube, creating a very stuttery movement. Because of the unique challenges this mechanic presented, creating and testing it tooks over 12 hours.