Daniel Whilock's Portfolio

Static difficulty systems in action games can fail to accommodate against a wide range of players skill levels. Leading to either experiences too easy, or experiences too hard. For example, in the standard difficulty selection, easy could be too easy, but normal could be too hard.

This project aimed to explore dynamic difficulty systems could create a more balanced and engaging experience when compared to static.
This game is an action game prototype made in unity, developed with both a static difficulty game(Type 1) and a DDA game(Type 2). Both systems have 3 phases, indicating easy, normal and hard, or in DDA systems case, relaxed, tense and stressful. Testers played both versions and provided feedback.


Worked on:
- Director system
- Reactive Behaviour Tree System
- AI

Assets:
- City fire creative commons music
- Unity asset particle materials from JMO

Optimisation and debugging are very important in programming, and that’s why it’s important to develop and implement different techniques in order to achieve it. This project, an experiment in testing different performance techniques, memory management techniques and integrity checking. Spatial partitioning which separates colliders into grids, Memory tracking of those colliders, pooling the memory at the start and threading to improve performance.

Worked on:
- Broad Phase Spatial Partitioning
- Memory Management, such as memory trackers, memory pool and heap walks
- Use of operator functions of new, memory user with malloc with a doubly linked list.

This tool is useful for spawning objects in a created polygonal area. Being able to click points on the map in unity, once having 3 or more points would create a shape. Within this shape you would be able to spawn objects with settings such as what to spawn, amount, scale and rotation. It also automatically determine what Y level the object should spawn at, so the users can create areas that can spawn through mountains, dips, including making sure it won't spawn in non-floored areas.

Worked on:
- Use of Editor, EditorWindow, visual elements and UI builder.
- Easy object management
- Easy node creation and tool handling