Unity Developer - Published 2024

I joined the team at Snowman in August of 2023 to help bring their first fully internal project ‘Laya’s Horizon’ across the finish line. I joined as a Developer and worked with the tech team bugfixing, implementing, and revising mechanics with production-ready code.

Laya’s Horizon is an amazing mobile title where the player takes on a magic wingsuit cape and glides down the mountain island. There’s NPCs to meet, races to win, challenges to complete, and much to explore!

Joining an existing project and codebase was a challenge. I started by familiarizing myself with the gameplay and scanning over a few scripts and how they were applied to Game Objects. My first tasks on the team were bugfixes, which were an excellent opportunity to take a close look at a system and gain an understanding of how it works.

Here's some of the things I did in Laya's Horizon

Dashwings

One of the game mechanics I had the opportunity of revising was the Dashwings. The existing system was functional, but unpolished and jittery in its prototype state.

The process included re-doing the bird’s movement system, spline follower, and a couple of effects. I also implemented some polish and UI.

Perch Walking

I completely revamped the player’s walking system. While perched, the player can swipe to rotate the camera, and the main character Laya will walk to centre-screen.

I was responsible for revamping this system from its old prototype state; this included redoing the movement, smoothing Laya’s walking speed, and implementing animations.

Mission Banners

Mission banners are placed on various landing points to guide the player to meet nearby NPCs. I also revised this system to make the banners better placed in-world and point more accurately to the NPCs.

In addition, I was responsible for only generating banners that would be on an accessible part of the perch. As seen on the left screenshot, gizmos display banners that failed to spawn due to broken segments of the in-game tower using red lines.

Editor tools

I was also tasked with creating multiple editor tools to help with development. One of such tools was the “conversation overflow detector”. I created this tool to cycle through all of our conversation pages in the game, in every supported language, to ensure we didn’t have any text overflow outside the text bubble.

This entailed getting the folder containing all the conversation assets, loading each one, displaying each page, and checking for overflows. As keys are detected they are logged with the language(s) that are the issue. The log can then be exported for ease of use.

I also created a tool to loop through a given folder of prefabs and open, edit, and save them in various ways. Our cutscene system used prefabs, but we needed a way to edit those prefabs en masse to replace old objects with new versions.

UI Programming

I even took on some UI programming. Another teammate designed and set up the interface, and I made it come to life ✨

I worked on UI for the three mission types in the game.