Rev.Eng

This game is being developed in C++.  I began the project primarily as a physics programmer, setting up our PhysX-based physics engine. Moving forward, as the game’s lead designer, I am focusing mainly on programming game logic and implementing level designs.

For our final project at DigiPen,  I found a group of similarly-minded people amongst my friends who wanted to make as impressive a game as we possibly could. An initial brainstorming session in my living room was soon followed by hours in front of dry-erase boards, and eventually we began working on what should be our greatest game so far: Rev.Eng.

Rev.Eng is a third-person shooter with a focus on exploration. The game follows space-cartographer Ava who, after a disastrous spaceship crash, finds herself  stranded in an abandoned science facility with the ability to integrate technology into herself. Confronted with ferocious creatures twisted and granted supernatural powers by the missing scientists’ chemicals, Ava acquires the means to defend herself by absorbing the Reversal Engine — or Rev.Eng — a device designed to drain objects of excess energy. With the Rev.Eng, she drains the life-energy of the monstrous animals she encounters, and acquires their supernatural abilities in the process. Using these new skills, she must explore the area surrounding her crash site to salvage the pieces of her ship essential  to grant her the capability to fly off the planet to safety.

For this project, my team is rather larger than I am accustomed — in addition to working with four other programmers from the school’s Real Time Interactive Simulation degree, our team also consists of six artists from DigiPen’s BFA in Production Animation program. Working with so many artists has posed its own set of unique challenges. The fact that our two degrees are currently split across two separate campuses often makes communication difficult; likewise, the fact that no single lab at the school has all of the programs necessary for both artists and programmers to work makes working together sometimes challenging. I’ve learned that programmers and artists often think quite differently about many aspects of game development; and in any case, reaching unanimous agreement in a team of eleven is obviously more difficult than the teams of four or five I had in previous years. As we see our game take shape, however, it’s obvious that all this overhead is more than worth it in the end: working with a team of talented artists has allowed us to work with characters and environments that are far better than the programmer art we would have otherwise thrown together, and will allow us to deliver a final product that is much more impressive in the end.

A pre-release trailer for the game can be seen here:

Here are some screenshots from a recent build of the game: