Patrick Mitchell

Remember Wonder was the capstone project of my master's degree in Game Design and Development, developed from August 2022 to May 2023. Due to a rocky start and team reorganization, I served as team producer in addition to my usual programming role. This added responsibility to prioritize development tasks and ensure team health/progress encouraged me to leverage the experience I'd gained in recent projects making custom editors, and improve workflow for everyone.

One such example is the grab system; to set up a grabbable object, it needed a trigger with a few references. Assigning these references could require some deduction for those not intimately familiar with the system, and be annoying for those that were. So I made an editor script with a custom inspector to assign said references automatically, since they were generally in the same relative place for each object. The script also allowed editing the sizes of the triggers on the children objects, removing the need to dig through the hierarchy or do math to switching between local space and global space. All in all, this script saved eight or more clicks per object. Given the frequent adjustments necessary, this saved a LOT of time and tedium.

A Taste of Culture was originally made for a class in the fall semester of 2022, and later in May, was accepted into the MAGIC Maker Program's "Prototype Edition;" a summer of development at MAGIC Spell Studios with "seed capital" of $1000. As the primary programmer for the summer, I expanded, fixed, and created many things, but one of the most distinct in my mind was preparing a new dialogue system for release. We'd imported a package to replace our old, self-made, and less robust system, but it was also missing some needed features. It supported events being invoked by the appearance of dialogue nodes, but not upon the end of the dialogue as a whole. So, I looked into the guts of the package, learned how to serialize events and display them in the package's interface, and then wrote to code to invoke said events. I was so uninvasive in doing this that, when reviewing the project to put it on this portfolio, I forgot it hadn't always been there!

This project was a large collaboration between engineering, exercise science, 3D art, and game development students at RIT developing a prototype for an astronaut training program, funded by NASA. I worked on it for course credit in the fall and spring semesters of 2022, as opposed to full-time like one of my teammates. Despite contributing less than full time, I was generously praised by my teammates for my fire-fighting efforts; just before the big event we were showcasing at, Imagine RIT, the game would crash before any gameplay for unknown reasons. I fixed the issue by finding a working branch, reverting to it, locating and removing the offending issue, and finally bringing each branch up to date once again. This saved us from redoing 2+ weeks of work—or rather, allowed those two weeks of work to see the light of day, given the looming deadline.

Something else I found delightful was the debug canvas I made. The aforementioned firefighting meant lots of taking a VR headset off and on to check the console. I made a prefab containing a camera and canvas on special sorting layers, meaning its contents could be seen in front of the player's face even while against walls and such. Using events, code could draw to this canvas if it was present in the scene, making it, in essence, a fancy VR-visible console. This allowed debugging that would otherwise require one person in the headset and another at the computer, and otherwise saved 45+ seconds of headset removal per test, quickly adding up to hours over the course of a week. Without a load of arduous set-up or clean-up, too!

Changeling is a VR narrative mystery game directed by a professor at RIT, Elouise Oyzon; students like myself were hired to further its development. I and two others were tasked with taking the half-finished Mother's Level to a state of near completion over the summer of 2021.

As the lead of this development squad, I was the primary point of communication between Elouise, my fellow Mother's Level developers, and the leads from the other squads. I requested and workshopped assets for Mother's Level with the audio and art teams, supported the debugging team's investigations using my narrower focus, and supplemented the Unreal learning process of one of my younger teammates with tips and tricks I'd learned from both an Unreal summer camp years ago and my ongoing experience.

I'm most proud of my investigations regarding the VFX for tethering to objects. The old system fired a trail of particles several times a second, which I replaced with a single beam attached to both ends. The ends of the beam would lag behind their targets unless they were set to target an actor, which wasn't an option for both ends. I figured out I could put the "start" of the particle system at the hitpoint of the player's tether input, then set the "end's" target to the player's hand. This eliminated all of the lag and improved intuitiveness, making the act of tethering to stuff more fun with just VFX.

In this mostly student-directed class, the goal was to develop VR development skills by creating prototypes for unusual or fringe gameplay features over the course of 2020's fall semester. Research and resourceful use of knowledge gained was the key to success here; we had to make sense of limited documentation and understand each parameter's exact function to ensure things like intuitive positions for objects while held.

I made Livewire Lifesaver as part of 2020's Ludum Dare 46 Compo, my first one. A polish run intended to be short turned into a summer-long passion project. While testing, I noticed that moving against a wall made you fall slower, almost like a wall-riding system, and wanted to make that an actual feature. My satisfaction with the results made things snowball from there.

This project was extremely formative for me; as I was developing solo, everything I wanted for the game had to come from me. I wanted controller support and rebindable controls, so I had to look into the sample code for Unity's new input system and reverse engineer it to work for my architecture. My work in this prepared me for future projects with tools-ish contexts, and earned me an award for thorough commenting and usability; one of the bestway to learn is to teach, after all.

I created the Divinity Story Hub from scratch to host my writing for a fantasy story series of the same name, since I was fed up with the lack of customization in other site-builders. I started in December of 2019 and continued to tweak it as I wrote new things, up to around 2021.

Taking advantage of my newfound freedom, I researched CORS requests to grab the contents straight from my working Google Document and directly into the HTML, enabling full CSS control and a faster workflow, thus encouraging me to "publish" my work more.