MASSIVE

One of the first things I tackled on this project was laying the networking foundation. I decided to use Photon Fusion since we wanted a playable prototype quickly, and the team had a bit of experience using it already. I set up infrastructure for joining games using a game code, and whichever client joined first was the host, allowing players to spin up a session whenever they desired.

Although I had worked on other networked projects, this was the first where players had immediate control of their avatars. It took me a lot of iteration and learning, but I think the character controller ended up feeling pretty good, even when ping wasn’t the best, thanks to the client-side prediction.

I was also focused on getting a good feeling kinematic character controller in as early as possible, since that is such an important part of the platforming experience. The design called for interchangeable traversal mechanics, so it was made to support various ways to adjust movement behavior. The first of these abilities was a ball mode, but it later had a glider, a dash that could go through certain walls, a double jump, a ground pound, and a few others. It also supported variable jump height, moving platforms, launchers, ziplines and increased speed when running down hill.

I also turned the capsule into a duck so players could see where others are facing, but also because ducks are cool (though, it definitely just came out more like Angry Birds than ducks 🤷‍♂️).

As mentioned above, the game had several character abilities that could be swapped out. Going into the system, we didn’t know all the types of abilities we’d want, so I tried to keep the system fairly generic, which made adding new abilities pretty easy. The system supported changes to the character controller behavior, cooldowns, various trigger types (i.e. instantaneous vs. toggled), and ability slots.

In 2023, I was getting serious about learning Unreal Engine, and had transitioned my personal project from Unity to Unreal. At the time, I was just trying to future-proof my career a bit, since the state of Unity felt shaky. However, my experience in Unreal started to really make an impact on the work I was doing in Unity, and one example of that is Massive’s attribute system. When design asked for a health system, I couldn’t help but take inspiration from Unreal’s attributes from their Gameplay Ability System. Although I didn’t create anything close to how robust Unreal’s system is for this prototype, I ended up with a system that made it very easy to adjust a character’s attributes in configurable ways using effects.

This also made the “social spark” feature we added later extremely easy. The spark was rewarded to players for performing social actions such as super-jumping to them, boosting them up a ledge, or simply being nearby, all of which were done with various different gameplay effects and the attribute system.

I also implemented a system to support various in-game events including time trials, soccer, a cooperative “glitch creature” collection game, and a team-based ring event where teams competed to secure rings.

The ring event was the one that made it into the final demo, and started after a set amount of time, serving as kind of the climax of the demo.

Fishing was another one of my favorite features I added to the prototype. There was a chance to hook other items, such as bombs and baseball bats, but most of the time you’d catch fish of varying sizes. The weights were also broadcast to other players so fishing competitions could be held. You could also pick up the fish you caught and hit your friend, just in case.