THE GUILD VR

A VR stealth game I developed with my partner for our thesis. During 7 months I was responsible for designing, modeling, and integrating the characters along with developing the weapons, and environmental interactions.

Developed with Unreal Engine 4 and Oculus Rift

Environments I was directly responsible for - modelling, texturing, composition, and lighting

ANIMATION

Working with Mixamo's Auto Rigging Tool still leaves work to do. From tweaking skin weights, making blendspaces, adding cloth simulation, adding morph targets, and putting it all together with an animation tree, these Goblin's finally came together.  

INTERACTION

Using Blueprint, added functionality to weapons, environmental obstacles, and Goblins. Being in VR, ragdolls were necessary for maximum fun.

AI LOGIC

With all these features, the core of the gameplay was sneaking around, or killing Goblins! Using a Behavior Tree, Goblins could react and respond to the player and eachother.

Special Hitbox for Expert Knife Throwers

Bladed Weapons can be thrown and stick to objects based on their Material 

Cutting Physics Contraints for sneaky Environmental Kills

Ragdoll physics simulation applied to all goblins on death

PROCEDURAL FOLIAGE

Problem: Need to create a foliage heavy environment in very little time, wanted lots of foliage without the time to create multiple variations of ferns.

Solution: By utilizing splines and control points, as well as random seeds, I could control certain aspects of meshes and foliage placement.

Outcome: With only one assets, countless different looking variations can be made instantly and then tweaked in engine by artists for maximum flexibility.

SPLINE SKIRTS

Problem: Need to create long paths / skirts using a couple of meshes. Placing them one by one by hand would take awhile - and if the path needs to change later down the line, each piece must be moved and adjusted!

Solution: Using for loops, a couple of variables, and a handful of meshes, an artist can quickly create randomized, non-destructive paths and skirts in seconds.

Outcome: A spline-based tool that can be reused for any series of meshes that rest along a general line / path, which can be tweaked easily and baked down to a single draw call once perfect.

PYTHON WEB SCRAPER

Problem: A class I wanted to take was full and I had to continually log in and check to see if any room opened up.

Solution: Using python and a raspberry pi, I wrote a script to continually check the class avaliability for me and notify my phone so I could take action anywhere anytime.

Outcome: Stress level greatly reduced, confident that my script could out preform any other students. 

SINISTAR REMAKE

Worked with a partner to recreate one of my favorite arcade classics! 

Essentially an exercise in blueprint and game-design, I focused on the player movement, asteroid mining, and enemies.

Software: Created in Unreal Engine 4 with Blueprint visual scripting.

ADVENTURE LAND

The beginnings of my foray into games - a text-based adventure game I coded years ago.

Using a 2D array of randomly generated places which contain randomly generated enemies, the player has to explore and find low level monsters to kill, level up, and slowly exterminate every monster on the map to win.

Software: Coded with Java

Copyright - Michael Filipek 2019