Tornado Outbreak
Overview
Tornado Outbreak was created at Loose Cannon Studios in Kirkland, WA by a team of approximately 30 employees over a period of 2 years. It was released in the US on September 29th, 2009.
My Role
My primary responsibilities were prototyping gameplay along with design and implementation of system components. My secondary function was as a code reviewer ensuring coding standards were applied and simple logic was followed. These tasks were accomplished using C/C++, C#, LUA, and VBScript.
Our approach to designing game play followed an iterative process with a primary goal of finding and enhancing the most enjoyable features of the game. Initial game play implementations were done using LUA to expedite iterations. However, once completed, C/C++ was used to optimize performance.
My work on system components included design and implementation of camera, FX, localization, and animation. The goal for the camera design was to minimize non-user input while maintaining optimal visuals. This was accomplished by coding in C/C++ using linear algebra, trigonometry, and quaternions.
I created the FX system using FX Studio in collaboration with the artists. My role was as liaison between the artists and a third party, Aristen, who developed FX Studio. After setting up FX Studio properties to enable artists to generate content, I used C# and C/C++ to pull the relevant data through the asset pipeline to the game engine. Particle dynamics were implemented using C/C++ followed by particle data rendering using OpenGL and DirectX.
For the localization task I choose Excel as the authoring tool. This allowed me to utilize VBScript to support ease of author input and for efficient export of localization data to the game. Additionally, I used C/C++ to create a system enabling the mapping of multiple languages to an ID.
To support the animation system, I authored a portion of a Maya Plugin to allow animators to map keyframes to animation ID’s. On the game engine side, I created the animation system by using Granny internally and designing a simple interface that allowed game engineers to utilize animations with a readable ID.
Skills Built
● Improved understanding of FX and animation systems
● Improved rendering techniques
● Professional experience with LUA, VBScript and C#
● Improved software architecture skills
● Improved code optimizations