Production Experience

I already had the Music Sync System in mind and was gathering a team to build an experience around it. For simplicity’s sake, the idea was “Imagine Rock Paper Scissors, but you could perform an ultimate ROCK that trumps your opponent’s paper, all the while matching up with BGM beats.”

Funny how it evolved to just… Rock. Though it quickly developed into an interesting idea since using a rock as the player character naturally lends itself to unusual mechanics in moving, attacking, stone skipping across a lake, breaking things with force, etc., not to mention I’m a huge fan of works without dialogues like Wall-E and other non-narrated animations. This was during Unreal 5.0 Early Access, and we were probably one of the very few teams who tried to incorporate Chaos physics into core gameplay mechanics while it’s still super broken. We paid dearly in dev time, but I also became familiar enough with it that I went on to use it on future projects.

Gaining an ungodly amount of Unreal knowledge aside, I found myself being drawn to the production side of things. I tried to lead the team using the Agile method and found myself enjoying the organizing and documenting in the hope of minimizing any development frictions for my teammates. I was also forced to learn so many things out of my discipline (namely Maya, Houdini, Shaders & Materials, Fluid Ninja, Niagara) in order to communicate with the team about our plans and actual deliverables. I was very happy to have enabled my teammates (who were very new to game dev) to produce something nice. Below are some of their VFX works.