Scraft if a fast paced arcade style shoot em up. When you kill enemies, you loot weapons that you can attach anywhere on your ship making it bigger and stronger, but also heavier and slower. If you get shot on a weapon, it detaches from your ship along with any weapon attached to it, making it possible to lose a big chunk of your ship if you're not careful. The game is also riddled with attractive black holes and repulsive white holes that becomes especially dangerous when your ship is heavy.

Game created on Unity, 10 weeks project in a team of 8.

This project was made for the 2023 Ubisoft Game Lab Competition where multiple video game related schools of Québec form teams of students to represent them. We had to make a video game following multiple constraints:

The theme was "Arcade"
We had to include a mechanic about construction
We had to include a mechanic about attraction and about repulsion
The game must include an online leaderboard

We were nominated in 4 categories:

Best User Experience
Best Game Design
Best Creativity and Integration of the Theme
Best Technical Challenge and Innovation

Trailer

Gameplay

As a programmer on a student project, I did a little bit of everything, but my two main tasks were designing and programming the construction system, and making the herd effect of the groups of enemies that traverse the screen.

Construction system

Players needed to be able to quickly transition between a state where they fly through space, to a state where they can place pieces around their spaceship in a constantly evolving shape.

Each new weapon has a "Spaceship Component" attached to it, with the center spaceship being a subclass of "Spaceship Component": "Spaceship Core".

Each component can have multiple children, which can itself have other children etc. In a tree structure.

Each component is represented by a collider and an array of point. The points of the array or linked one to the next by segments and define a perimeter around the component, multiple functions allow conversions from coordinates in various reference frames to percentage of the perimeter. For simplicity sake we'll call this percentage of the perimeter a "perimeter position".

When you touch a new weapon, the point of contact is converted to a perimeter position, moving left or right will increase or decrease this perimeter position and the new value will be converted back into regular 2D coordinates to move the weapon on screen.

Each segment has a normal, the direction its looking toward. The new child is rotated toward the normal of the segment its currently one, except when nearing points where the neighboring segments will gradually influence the rotation, to avoid sharp turns.

When a child is attached to a Spaceship Component, the array of point is updated to define the perimeter of the Spaceship Component and its children. The two polygons are merged together using a technique called polygon clipping and implemented using the clipper library made by Angus Johnson. The process is recursive so that the core always have an up to date perimeter.

We needed to be able to quickly create new spaceship components, to define what is their pivot point, what direction they face as they are placed around the parent, what is the "tipping point" that moves in the rotating phase etc.

We had to be able to visualize all of that, so it was important to make good gizmos.

To add tension near black-holes, a shaking movement is added to the components. This shaky effect is obtained using a randomly generated product of sinusoidal functions to efficiently get a chaotic looking curve.

The same curve technique was used for my second main task, the task that gave me the taste for group behaviors simulation.

Enemy Swarms

We wanted to have huge groups of enemies moving through the screen. If every enemy moved into a straight line, it would have looked too artificial, so instead they follow a curve defined by a randomized product of sinusoidal functions.

Each enemy starts with a random offset and multiplier, ensuring they all look coherent but unique. To avoid hindering performances, the Unity Job System is used so the calculation for the position and rotation of each enemy could be run on separate threads.

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Construction system

Enemy Swarms

Jérémy L. Auclair - Game programmer