Internship
For my end-of-studies internship, I applied for the position of gameplay programmer at Cyborn (Borgerhout, Antwerp, Belgium). I was very fortunate to have my application accepted and did my internship there from February 2021 to June 2021.
Cyborn used to be an animation studio mainly, where they worked on films such as “Dragon Rider” and “PLOEY: You Never Fly Alone”. The company has an in-house mocap studio which was nice to see, but I never used it personally. For the last couple of years they have been developing their first VR title which is called “Hubris”. I joined their team full of talented individuals and helped them to further develop this amazing project.
Hubris
Hubris is a story-driven action-adventure game set in VR, where you play as a new recruit of the Order Of Objectivity and have to unravel the mysteries of a lost agent named Cyanha. The game is made with Unreal Engine and uses C++ and blueprint technology for their implementations. The game features many different interactive elements such as weapons, printers, enemies, vehicles, etc., and also features different movement capabilities such as walking, jumping, climbing and swimming.
What did I do?
I mainly worked on revamping or improving mechanics that were already in the game, such as:
• A new weapon system, going from a simple pickup-able gun to a fully-fledged player-bound weapon system with recoil and a UI weapon selection wheel
• A new context sensitive implementation for an upgrade system in the game, which means that you can insert any item into it and it shows the possible upgrades
• A new main menu, with a lot more options
• An improved shield system, which made the shield handle more like a medieval shield
I also did my fair share of prototyping and constructing new features such as:
• A throwable, climbable rope
• A new printer system that allows you to print the climbable rope
• A player module system, which allows the player to upgrade their abilities such as a defensive shield
• Some other small testing prototypes
I was also involved in the design and implementation of the game flow of some levels and I did some usual bug fixing, performance enhancing and refactoring.
How did I improve?
Working at Cyborn was my first opportunity to be part of an actual professional production team. I learned:
• How to create and maintain professional and structured workflows whenever I was working on something.
• How to communicate in a big team properly, I worked together with designers and artists to ensure the quality of certain features.
• How to handle big projects and code structures and maintain them in a clean and orderly fashion.
I improved my knowledge and skills in:
• Unreal Engine 4 (VR)
• C++ and Blueprints
Vacation work
After my internship, Cyborn offered me a vacation job. I accepted and stayed at Cyborn for another 2 months. I quit working there since I wanted to pursue other goals in my life, one of which was sound design.
