Pitstop Profits - Frontier Developments Client Project

This project was a larger group project that lasted the whole academic year, my group had 12 people in it, with a spread across disciplines, 5 programmers, 4 artists, 1 designer, and 2 producers. The brief we had, was to create a proof of concept demo for a tycoon game with an open theme. we had to ideate and test out a few different ideas but ended up on a go kart park tycoon game.

My main contributions were focused around the AI visitors in the game, they are a pivotal component in tycoons games, if they don't function correctly and move smoothly the whole game will feel off. This gave me chance to try and make AI on a larger scale, at times having thousands of active visitors in the game. I also made the spawner system for the ai, something that happened to be more complex an initially thought due to the number of factors we wanted to affect the spawn rate. Additionally, the spawner ran though a quadratic function to provide the ability to have low and peak times during the day. Both of these were made trickier as we need them to respond to a change in time scale, as many tycoon games allow for the speeding up of time, this was probably the thing i found hardest, as it was particularly awkward of get thing to feel smooth at higher speeds.

My biggest take away from this project how how cool and fun it was to work in a bigger team, having longer days of working together, across and within disciplines to create something more complete then any project I'd worked on before.

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