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Volcanewt (2024)

Lizard Lair Games

Role: Programmer

Engine: Unreal Engine 5

Volcanewt is a flashy, comedic adventure with darker undertones featuring the Volcanewt, a massive volcanic newt that goes stomping through several cities creating a wake of destruction in his path. The Volcanewt annihilates human cities in its path and crushes their pitiful but growing resistance with lumbering attacks to showcase the strength and power of this enormous beast. The Volcanewt slashes through buildings, spits fire at the opposition, and uses his tongue to devour fleeing civilians. Some features I’ve implemented to the game include the following:

• Programming and creating a behavior tree for "B.I.R.T.H.D.A.Y," the game's first boss fight
• Implementation of new enemies such as a tanks and 2 types of turrets
• Implementation of the Newt's Tongue Attack to restore player health
• Optimizations to the game's blueprints
• Adjustments to the movement and combat mechanics for the newt
• Bug fixing and playtesting to ensure the game meets quality standards

I entered the project about midway into pre-production. At this time, the Lizard Lair Games team nearly doubled in size, so we were able to scope the game up to much more than what was originally planned for. My role on the team is one of two programmers and since joining, I have been tasked with a number of features to improve upon the systems already built into the game.

The game is scheduled to release in May 2024, so there is still much more for us to implement. This is my first major project in Unreal Engine, so it was at first a challenge understanding how blueprints and other aspects of the Unreal environment work. After some time, however, I started to get more of an understanding of how things work.