CubeRunner, Path of Exile

I have spent a lot less time working on my hobby game "CubeRunner" (yeah I don't have an actual name yet) than I would like but work and life keeps me busy! I recently implemented a level system for the game. I got inspired whilst I was playing Track Mania and realised a lot of people playing my game would enjoy a level system to unlock, work on and complete. The infinite game mode is fun and all but can get boring really quick. It is also at the downfall of randomisation and procedural generation rules which can sometimes be repetitive or simply uncreative compared to hand-made levels. I play to implement several difficulty stages with several levels each.

Once I have completed the levels system, I will need to add a save / load system so that players can properly progress. Luckily UE4 has great features available for saving / loading information which makes it easy! After that I plan to finish my upgrades (bonuses) system as well as some advanced features such as physics based obstacles, dynamic obstacles and the advanced control mode itself.

To aid my assistance as a developer at GGG I created a stat description generator tool. As a gameplay programmer I create quite a lot of stats for items and monsters etc. Most of these stats will need descriptions added so they can be displayed as mods on an item. Creating stats is reasonably fast but I spent almost just as much time creating the descriptions for them. This is mainly due to having to manually create the txt file, set the correct format and layout the file properly so it can be parsed by the client. My tool automates all of this and makes it much quicker to create the files.

Creating tools to help yourself with development (or anything) is very satisfying and shows how investing some time into something can feel like a tangent, but can end up saving you countless time and hours!