KEVIN CHANDLER
TECHNICAL GAME DESIGNER
UNPUBLISHED WORK
Disclaimer
If you are reading this, I hope it means you have taken a look at my professional work and have seen enough to make you want to take a deeper dive into into some of the weirdness I get up to. I'm proud of these projects, warts and all, and the process of building these helped me learn and grow as a technical designer
Vehicle HMI
Unreal has put an emphasis on vehicle Human Machine interfaces as an application of the game engine. Here is an example of an HMI I made for an electric vehicle to try out a few ideas.
Features
- Widget Blueprint Scripting
- Custom material shader for the fill bars
- Color Blind Mode
- Scrollable album list
- Accounts for generating power while braking
- Units switch between Metric and Imperial
- Red warning vignetting on the border to draw attention to the screen if there is a new alert
​
​
*The art is not mine but I made the functionality
Guitar Hero without the controller
I have been a rhythm game fan for years but I have always wondered if there was a way to make it more accessible by using standard peripherals. I have conceived of two methods, one for VR and one for standard mouse and keyboard.
For VR, the "neck" hand controller moves a cursor left and right as if you were moving your hand up and down the frets of the guitar. The string hand registers movement in the controller and if enough distance has been reached in a short enough amount of time it registers it as a strum.
For PC and I have been experimenting with using the horizontal and vertical axis of the mouse to replace the 5 buttons of the guitar hero system. The 5 basic positions are still there, but now you simply move your mouse the postion instead of pressing a button to hold down blue, green red, etc. The issue of chords is handled by the vertical axis. A the position of the lowest note in the chord sets where the note is on the horizontal axis and the highest note determines where the note is vertically. It is a work in progress but there is some potential.
Since Rock Band and Guitar Hero have fallen out of fashion, several PC games have come out that allow a dedicated group of fans to continue making new playable music using a format called "charts". A chart shows where the note needs to be on the note runway as the song progresses There are several charting programs, though my favorite is one called Moonscraper, and there is an online database of thousands of charted songs.
I used C++ to convert .chart files into text and then parsed it out into an array of notes. I then procedurally place those notes in the world along a spline and as the player travels they encounter the notes and they move the cursor meet them. What this means is that all you need is to go to the chart archive, grab the song you want, put it in the right folder and it will appear as s playable option in the song select menu.
The Journey
I wanted to try to get away from the traditional formula in rythym games where the note runway comes at you at a constant pace and you only really focus on the notes. That seemed like a waste especially in VR, so instead of a linear runway I made it a spline that flies through the game world. I even included events that happen around the player like a space battle between capital ships as the player flies through an asteroid belt.
Environment Reactive UI
There was a game called Descent: Freespace that had an interesting menu UI where the environment would react to your mouse movements. Your camera was located in a hanger bay on a capital ship and as you hovered your mouse over doors and objects, they would animate and react and labels would appear indicating what would happen if you clicked on it. I wanted to create that similar "cool" factor but I wanted the menus to flow similar to a modern game like Fortnight, Apex Legends or Valorant that favor ease of use with functionality spread out over various sub menus. So I made the menus then hooked up various animation sequences to create a visual feast for the eyes as you navigated through menus.
6DOF AI Pathfinding/Combat Logic
While Unreal's native AI pathfinding is great, it does not handle flight navigation very well. I created steering behaviors that allowed AI fighter craft to navigate towards an objective but also steer around obstacles. There is still a lot of jerkiness but at least they are not getting stuck.
​
I have also implemented high level combat decisions using a behavior tree. Enemies work in wings and follow the orders of their wing commander. When a wing commander dies another member of the wing becomes the wing commander and gives target instructions.
Capital Ship Battle Damage
The problem I faced with making a destructible capital sihp was making a model look seamless so the holes are not obvious, but have a way to detect what piece the player has hit and remove it but at the same time not have to spend a lot of time in editor hand placing pieces into each hole. I also wanted to have a lot of variety to each hole or piece broken off. It can break immersion if each hole is exactly the same.
​
I ended up going into Blender, taking a full capital ship model and using the intersect tool starting cutting out chunks of the ship, but leaving the chunks in their same place, so the ship looked seamless but if you removed the chunk the hole would be there. I then attached each cut out piece to a skeleton rig and imported it into Unreal. I then set it up to detect damage on a piece and when hit with enough damage it will disappear and spawn in a particle effect of some debris, leaving a perfect hole in the ship.
O'Neill Cylinder
I've always wanted to try and make a dyson sphere or O'Neill Cylinder in a game, but at the time I know I would be able to texture it properly. I devised a way to make a heightmap in photoshop, put it into blender to make a terrain, then bend the terrain to make a cylinder shape, then in Unreal use a heightlerp to make different colors appear at different heights on the heightmap. You can see more on how I accomplished this in my blog.
