Thief of Smiles
Thief of Smiles is a 2D physics puzzle game with stealth elements. Move lamps, fling barrels, tie up enemies and swing through levels. But be sure to stay hidden in the shadows. All you need for this is your chewing gum companion Ponti. Uncover the dark secrets of the Smiles Savings Bank!
Developed at Irox Games
Development time: 1 year
My Part
As a stealth game, the enemy behaviour was a main concern. So my part was to handle any implementation and systems concerning those unfriendly creatures. This included creating a tool and implementation for behaviour trees, navigation graph creation and traversal, animation and logic interactions, …
Later in development I took over maintanance of other implementation areas and did a full refactor for splitting up all logical parts to run independently (player, enemy, world, ui, …).
Learnings
It is hard to develop a system when the final game design for it is unknown. The enemy behaviour turned out to be much simpler than expected so a simpler system as a custom behaviourtree with scene wide navigation would probably have saved quite some development time. On the other hand, using the system in the end to make some changes was quite fast. And of course the experience I got while developing it will be useful.
For the refactoring part: I absoluteltly love dependency injection when it is set up correctly. Just being able to drag a few object into a scene and having them work together corretly without having to configure anything else is perfect for enjoying testing features and building new levels!