Retrieve The Artefact
Project Overview: Developed as a Final Major Project, Retrieve The Artefact is a top-down extraction shooter featuring a fully procedural world. The core focus was building modular gameplay systems that support diverse weapon types and complex AI behaviors.
Award: ACC Best Games Design And Development Award 2023
Technical Highlights
Procedural World Generation
Dungeon Architecture: Engineered a multi-stage generation pipeline using the Random Walk algorithm for organic room shapes and a Constrained Random Walk for corridor connectivity.
Smart Spawning: Implemented a weighted distribution system utilizing Dijkstra’s Algorithm to calculate path costs, ensuring balanced enemy density and item placement relative to the player’s spawn.
Modular Gameplay Systems
Extensible Weapon Architecture: Designed a data-driven weapon system supporting varied firing modes (Automatic, Burst, Manual) and projectile archetypes.
Advanced Projectiles: Scripted specialized projectile behaviors, including:
Sub-emitter/Split-shot: Recursive instantiation on impact.
Vector-based Homing: Dynamic target acquisition and course correction logic.
State-Driven Inventory: Built a robust swap-and-drop system for primary/secondary weapon management, utilizing a clean state-machine approach to handle animations and physics transitions.
AI & Animation
Procedural Creature Animation: Developed a multi-segment “Centipede” AI using Line Tracing and procedural animation to ensure segments realistically follow the lead head’s terrain path.
Context-Aware AI: Programmed ranged enemies with adaptive behaviors that transitioned between aggressive states based on proximity and line-of-sight checks.
Systems & UX
Rebindable Input Architecture: Created a comprehensive UI system for real-time input remapping (Keyboard & Controller), supporting persistent player configurations.
Performance-Optimized UI: Developed a dynamic Minimap system using Render Textures and custom shaders to visualize real-time entity tracking and world discovery.
Graphics & Audio Pipelines: Integrated a modular settings menu handling Vsync, resolution scaling, and multi-channel audio mixers (Master/SFX/Ambience).
Gameplay Screenshots
