Age of Wonders 4

Period:

Year 4

 

Duration:

40 weeks

 

Team Size:

Company

 

Role:

Gameplay & UI

 

Game Engine:

Custom Engine

 

About the Game:

Age of Wonders 4 is a blend of 4X strategy and turn-based tactical combat. In the game you can create and rule a fantasy realm of your own design.

The game focuses on the fantasy aspect of creating and expanding an empire by controlling the realm with diplomacy and achieving  your victory condition

 

 

Roles & Contributions:

For this project I worked primarily as a gameplay & UI programmer. 

  • Creating new UI
    • Tooltips
    • Interfaces
  • Expanding on pre-existing systems
    • Ranking systems
    • Faction creation/Modularity system
  • Q&A / Bug fixing
    • Creating Debugging imgui
    • Works in rmgui
  • Adding new features
    • Diplomacy trading
    • House vassalizing
    • War coordination

Examples

I implemented the tooltip content and the dynamic information updates following a pre-made design. Additionally, I proficiently sorted the list in descending order.

I crafted a player information breakdown, handling data retrieval and setup to highlight your status in relation to the player. Additionally, I engaged in an iterative feedback cycle with design and art teams, ensuring a refined final product.

I extended the player’s tooltip functionality to display the player’s relationship status with others, necessitating a substantial overhaul of the diplomacy system. Previously focused solely on self-comparisons, this enhancement involved a comprehensive redesign.

I introduced an ordering system in the overview, using buttons to sort player rankings in ascending order. This required comparing and merging independent ranking systems into a cohesive framework, influencing both rank determination and overall gameplay dynamics, while removing pre-existing ones.

I addressed issues with the race transformation’s dropdown for switching between races. This involved reworking the race transformation code to rectify several problems that were preventing transformations for the non-player chosen races.

I enabled the display of income generated by a player trait by establishing and presenting an income breakdown. This task involved setting up a breakdown structure, which wasn’t in place.

Challenges - Learning Points

My main goal for this project was to acclimate myself to reading and understand large codebases. Triumph Studios engine being a custom engine in development for over 25+ years, fits the bill perfectly. My responsibilities were primarily: debugging, UI/UX development, controller support. To do this I implemented code across the code base, changing, polishing and adding new code where necessary, this allowed me to affect a large amount of the code base and changing large fundamentals of the game.

 

 

 

Additional learning points:

  • Multi-disciplinary Communication
  • Source controls: Git & SVN
  • Following coding standards