Fran Ruiz - Level Design

Role

Gameplay / Tools programmer

Date

  • May 2020 – Sep 2020

Genre

  • Strategy, Simulation, Sandbox

Platform

Nintendo Switch, Play Station, Xbox, PC

Game description

Build an intricate prison, hire the best staff, and pamper your prisoners to create the perfect rehabilitation facility in Prison Tycoon: Under New Management.

Responsabilities

Define, design and develop gameplay features focused on the 3 C’s design, usability and game feel

• Design and develop tools that streamline aspects of the development

Collaborate with other programmers and designers to achieve an engaging gameplay

Contributions

I joined the development of ‘Prison Tycoon’ in its early stages, prototyping a wide range of camera proposals to ensure it felt intuitive, natural, and satisfying to use. Tweaking values like velocity, acceleration, or movement curves and analyzing, evaluating, and proposing the different iterations to the team.


Also worked on AI during the early development, developing an expansible finite-state machine. It allowed basic behaviors like wandering, patrolling, and moving through interest points during a day and night cycle that affected their decision-making. To do this I used Unity’s AI tools complementing them with custom scripts to have complete control of their behavior.


Besides gameplay features, I was in charge of developing tools that helped to speed up the pipeline of the development. One of them was a random character generator used to create a wide pool of unique entities, from aesthetics like age, skin tone, clothes, hair, and accessories to names, descriptions, history background, and personalities.