Dead Matter, by indie company Quantum Integrity Software Inc., is a zombie survival rogue-lite set in a near future, post-apocalyptic Alberta. Bringing together various, handpicked elements of the open-world survival genre, along with our own original touches, Dead Matter aims to quench the community’s thirst for a title to properly balance survival mechanics with fulfilling gameplay.
The project has seen two successful crowdfunding campaigns, the first on Kickstarter, and the other on Indiegogo.
Responsibilities
Gameplay Programming
- Implementation of the game’s core mechanics for the closed alpha’s release.
- Improved the network synchronized time to account for latency in order to have better timestamps for deterministic use.
- Created networked elevators using the synchronized timestamp to replicate movement, allowing for perfectly synchronized movement with very low bandwidth usage.
- Reworked the vaulting system to have clientside prediction to avoid rubberbanding in multiplayer environments.
- Implemented ladder logic to also work in multiplayer without having to route them through the character movement component.
- Saving and loading of the game’s state & players via a custom made SQLite wrapper.
- Regular profiling of the game’s performance and bandwidth usage, and tweaks in order to keep them ready for high player counts.
- Implemented networked environment lights that could easily be setup by level designers. These could be broken or have their lightbulbs replaced by players.
- Added special quest containers that would only be accessible to the player(s) the quest belonged to. These would only replicate to them and acted as either quest reward containers or required quest item containers.
- Refactoring legacy code such as the minigame system and death system to be more flexible with the project’s changing requirements and more resilient to bad networking conditions.
- Fix bugs and crashes reported by the community during the closed alpha, some of them being hotfixes released during the night when critical.
- Took part in the 0.6 to 0.7 code rewrite to bring the codebase to a better standard for future updates.
Editor Tools
- Automated top-down map texture generator for a map item. It loaded every sublevel of the map one by one to capture a top-down shot and then stitch everything into one texture.
- Housekeeping tools to keep the project clean and fix asset issues in bulk.
- Level Design oriented tools for the level design team, at their request.
Project Build System
- Created a build program in C# that would allow us to run automated builds at given times, or manual builds of the game.
- These would automatically be uploaded to Steam for updates.
- The build system used Discord’s API as an interface, allowing any team member to start a development build simply by typing Discord commands.
Lead Programmer
- Lead newer members of the team through the codebase, helping them understand it and proceed with their tasks.
- Ensure proper application of the codebase’s coding standards, and make sure code is kept maintainable at all times.