In the Summer of 2021 I worked on Call of Duty: Vanguard as part of a Level Design internship at Sledgehammer Games. I worked with the campaign team. Since the game was slated to release in November, most of my work was in polishing what was already there. Most of my work was in the Stalingrad level, which had the pleasure of being shown off at Gamescom! Watch the video below to see gameplay of the level I worked on
As a Level Designer I worked a lot in Radiant (COD Level Editor) and GSC scripting. I worked on implementing and polishing many features such as clip (collision), mantle/mount, AI entrance and cover behavior, vehicle pathing, death hints, objectives, npc animations, and other miscellaneous systems. I even helped optimize a system involving ai spawning to help with performance issues on PS4. I learned a lot about AAA game development over my internship, including tools such as Jira and Perforce, and just how the game development process works towards the end of a project
Doggy Disk was made in only two days, during a Game Jam. I led a team of five people, as we designed and built a game Unity, all around the theme "All Around You". We decided we wanted to do a sort of tower defense where the enemies come from every direction. We came up with a unique twist though - all your towers are on layers of disks, which you can spin to better position them to deal with the hordes of cats.
BeatDown was a project I led as part of the VGDev club (Video Game Development Club) at Georgia Tech in the Spring of 2021. The goal was to make a game within the short timeframe of only 1 semester. This was the first game I led as part of the VGDev club. I brought with me a prototype of the game and created a presentation to pitch it to the club and get members interested on working on it.
BeatDown is a rhythm game where you control a shape that moves along a grid. You are able to move each time a beat happens, as well as charge up and use powerups or devastating ultimate moves. You can see a short video showing off the game and how it works a bit above.
I'm most proud of the complex rhythm system we made. It allows for people to easily create all sorts of different tap patterns for songs, and after lots of tweaking it never gets off-beat or feels bad. I'm also proud of the AI we developed as its behavior is patterned and makes sense but is also not too predictable and is capable of surprising the player. In addition, this was the first game I developed with Multiplayer in mind, so I learned a lot about networking over the course of working on this game, as I did most of the networking programming. It even works with steam!
Over the summer of 2020, I applied for a job to work on a project under Georgia Tech's DILAC Lab. After getting accepted, I joined a team of mostly graduate students who wanted to help spread awareness about disease spread and prevention during a pandemic. They did this through video games. There were two teams making different games to show off a pandemic modeling system Georgia Tech had developed and would release to the public to encourage others to make informative pandemic-based games.
I was on a relatively smaller team of 5 or so people (some have left/joined since) working on a Unity game to demonstrate how the pandemic model can be used on a "micro" scale. In our case, we designed and programmed a game about shopping in a grocery store during a pandemic. As Sean Bloom put it while playing our demo, it's a stealth action game that makes the player feel the discomfort and even terror of getting close to potentially infected people in a grocery store.
Working on a team, I had a lot of practice with important skills in game dev. I worked with GIT in making and merging branches, I worked with Unity and utilized their very Object-Oriented design in conjuction with C# scripts, and I helped with planning and designating tasks for different team members. We had a big demo day in front of the people at Indiecade at the end of July, and helped to establish the Indiecade: Jamming the Curve Game Jam. As of April 2021, the project has finished, and you can download and play the game below
©2020 BY DREW BUSCH