necroSpace - Round Two For Team Game Development

Overview

This project was a direct evolution of the original BLAMetry! game built the previous semester, rebuilt from the ground up with more polished game mechanics, dedicated artwork, and a full sound design pass. Rather than using C-Processing, this iteration was developed in a proprietary game engine framework provided by the school — a shift that came with its own set of constraints and opportunities. Working within someone else’s engine architecture meant learning its conventions quickly while still finding ways to extend it with custom systems. My contributions spanned audio, UI, math libraries, asset integration, and presentation — touching nearly every layer of the project from low-level engine utilities to the player-facing experience.

Custom FMOD Audio Wrapper

I wrote a custom wrapper around the FMOD Core API to handle all of the game’s audio needs. The wrapper abstracted away the verbosity of the raw API and gave the rest of the team a clean interface for audio playback and real-time modulation — adjusting volume, pitch, and effects without needing to interact with FMOD directly. This system became the backbone of the game’s sound design, powering everything from background music to tightly timed UI feedback and in-game audio cues.

The game’s main menu wasn’t a traditional button-based layout — instead, the player piloted a spaceship around the screen and selected options by flying into portals. Each portal triggered a unique animation and sound effect on contact, making menu navigation feel like part of the game itself rather than a separate screen. I implemented the full interaction loop: spaceship movement, collision detection with portal regions, and the corresponding audiovisual feedback on selection. This system set the tone for the entire player experience before gameplay even began.

To give the UI depth and visual polish, I created a parallax scrolling effect for the menu background, with layered elements moving at different speeds relative to the player’s spaceship. I also implemented the animation and sound design for menu selection events — ensuring that transitions between screens felt responsive and cohesive. These details were small individually but together gave the game a level of presentation quality that elevated it well beyond a typical student project.

Vector & Matrix Math Libraries

I wrote custom vector and matrix math libraries from scratch and integrated them into the engine’s graphics pipeline. These libraries handled the transformations, projections, and coordinate math that the rendering system depended on — giving me direct experience with the linear algebra that underpins real-time graphics. Building these utilities by hand rather than relying on an off-the-shelf math library deepened my understanding of how game engines translate abstract math into pixels on screen.

Startup Sequence & Audio-Synced Splash Screens

I created the game’s startup sequence as a series of splash screens timed precisely to audio events. Each screen transitioned in sync with the soundtrack, producing a polished, cinematic feel right from launch. Getting the timing right required close coordination between the audio wrapper I had built and the engine’s rendering and scene management systems — a satisfying integration point where several of my contributions came together.

Sprite Sheet Animation & Asset Integration

I was responsible for integrating the game’s art assets through a sprite sheet animation system. This involved parsing sprite sheets, defining frame sequences and timing, and hooking the resulting animations into the engine’s rendering pipeline so that characters and objects could be animated smoothly in-game. This work bridged the gap between our artists’ output and the running game, ensuring that visual assets made it from file to screen without fidelity loss or manual overhead.