Stella & Orbit: Take Flight

Project #7

As an alien with a knack for technology, escape the abusive orphanage using your self-built companion. Traverse through the space harbor and realize your dream of becoming a pirate.

Genre: 3D Platformer

Production Time: 15 weeks (50%)

Team Size: 18

Engine: Tre Rader Kod (in-house)

My Contributions:

Environmental platforms: I worked on three different types of platforms, helping the player move through the levels.
Hazardous police: I implemented behavior for police placed throughout the levels, that captures the player if coming too close.

Reflection

This is the seventh project at The Game Assembly and is currently still in development. In this project, I initially worked on three different types of platforms – moving platforms, horizontally rotating platforms, and vertically rotating platforms – and later developed hazard police behavior.

Environmental platforms

Creating the horizontally rotating platforms was very challenging as it required a lot of matrices and math, making the player keep its’ relative position on the platform as well as its’ relative rotation. We have since then updated our rotations to use quaternions instead, slightly altering the original implementation.

Police

There are police placed throughout the levels of the game, capturing the player if coming too close. I iterated on the police behavior many times by, for example, adding ray casting and height checks, preventing the police from capturing the player through walls and preventing the player from jumping over the police (unless the height is reasonable, of course.)