AI In Unity DOTS

At the beginning of the project, I worked on designing and prototyping systems for the AI, particularly the dog fighting AI. This helped us iterate later on by showing us for example that enemy planes should always attack from the front of the player for it feel fair. I worked together with designers to bring these iterations during development.

This also was my first project using Unity DOTS. I made use the new data oriented technology stack to implement a boid system which helped stay at target performance. And I used the component based approach to reuse behavior between all AI.

Project Management

During the prototyping phase of the project, I was part of our projects management team as programming lead. Here worked together with the other leads and producer to set up QA, create the planning each week and high level planning for the coming weeks. I also was responsible for communication, addressing concerns from the other programmers, and communication with our teachers who functioned as stack holders.

I also created multiple presentations to help people who wanted to learn more about using the Unity engine in order to support designers and artists within our team who hadn't used the Unity engine before.

Flying Controls

I worked together with designers to improve on the initial player plane controls prototype. This was a challenge as we wanted to map the 3 axes of movement an airplane can have to the 2 axes of a joystick to maintain an arcade feel. I made heavy use of quaternion math in order to allow the player free movement within the air.

I split the plane physics code in different components within Unity DOTS. This allowed me to reuse the same code for all other flying entities in our world, such as birds and enemy planes.