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. Nominated for best prototype at DCP (German video games awards)
Development time: 1 year
August 10, 2023
My Part
As a stealth game, the enemy behavior 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 behavior trees, navigation graph creation and traversal, animation and logic interactions, …
Later in development, I took over maintenance of other implementation areas and did a full refactor to split up all logical parts to run independently (player, enemy, world, UI, …).
Learnings
It is hard to develop a system when its final game design is unknown. The enemy behavior turned out to be much simpler than expected, so a simpler system as a custom behavior tree with scene-wide navigation would probably have saved quite some development time. On the other hand, using the system to make some changes in the end was quite fast. And, of course, the experience I got while developing it will be helpful.
For the refactoring part: I absolutely love dependency injection when it is set up correctly. Just dragging a few objects into a scene and having them work together correctly without having to configure anything else is perfect for enjoying testing features and building new levels!