Worlds Collide

Worlds Collide is a light RTS strategy game with terrain manipulation elements. Players choose one of several factions to lead - Goblins, Robots, or Dwarves - against one of their enemies. This was my capstone for my bachelor's in game development at Purdue.

Art by Savinah Fadlevic

My Role

I worked as a blueprint scripter on this project, where I was responsible for designing the Building system, as well as miscellaneous functionalities, prototyping, and tech-art as needed.

The Team

Name	Role
Uma Claire	Production Lead
Luc	Production
Lucas	Design Lead
Rose	Programming Lead
Jacob	Art Lead
Elijah S	Programming
Lev	Programming
Aiden	Programming
Justin	Technical Artist
Elijah G	Level Design & Audio Coordinator
Orkun	Documentation & QA
Liam	Combat (Design & Program)
Alex	Music
Jinwoo	3D Modeler
Christian	Modeler
Zaire	Art Integration
Renee	2D Concept Artist
Savi	UI & Menu Artist
Jiaxiang Li	Animation & VFX
Lydia	Rig 1
William	Rig 2 & 3D Animator

The Build System

For the game, I created a building system hierarchy - there's a base blueprint that all buildings inherit from, with an additional layer of inheritance for each different faction, and lastly, child blueprints for each individual building.

I also made a struct that contained common stats such as health, cost, damage output, what types of troops it can produce, etcetera, and then put that struct into an array that could be accessed by different upgrade paths.

Cartoon Shader

Since I had experience making toon shaders in past projects, I made a more complex one for Worlds Collide that was more stylistically interesting. A lot of the work was in adjusting the post process settings and dealing with edge cases such as with excessively smooth textures or metallic textures.

Above: The Toon Shader that I created tested on several different types of materials, along with an early iteration of the faction-based UI, with this one being the Goblin-style.

User Interface

Another one of my tasks was to take our basic User Interface and stylize it based on the faction chosen by the user. Working with assets from our 2D artist, Savy, I made a data table system where based on a single index - the faction choice - the UI could pull a collection of buttons and update the styles of the UI to match, while also preserving some universal styles.

Below: The Goblin and Robot versions of the UI.

Above: The Settings & Keybinds Menu

Multiplayer Replication

Although it was not my primary role, I helped work on multiplayer replication by creating a library of functions that allowed for easy access to a complete list of player controllers, which for some reason Unreal does not intrinsically have, and also a way to assign player controllers to only be able to give orders to units of the faction they chose.

Fog of War

Early on in the project, the team believed that we might want to use a fog of war system to allow players only to see objects and enemies within range of their units. This feature ended up being cut due to changing engine versions, causing the system to no longer work.