Blog: Dive Time Game
- Jack Stevenson
- 7 hours ago
- 2 min read
Dive Time: Sprint 1
February 2, 2025
Dive Time is a swimming side-scroller shooter, where you must navigate deep ocean depths and hunt valuable fish all while not drowning or succumbing to hostile wildlife. The deeper you go, the stranger fish get and the worse pollution becomes. You purchase upgrades with the money you make by selling fish, allowing you to dive deeper and survive longer.
Katherine Jackson, our team's lead designer, created this game concept and assembled a team of 10 artists, animators, and programmers, including me. For this project, I am designated as the lead programmer, and I am going to be in charge of developing intricate systems alongside another programmer that I'll coordinate with closely.
To start things off, I created the base project files and GitHub for our game. We're going to be using Unreal Engine 5.7.2, which I'm excited to get more experience with. Before I created the GitHub for our project, though, I wanted to first optimize our project to ensure it ran as well as it could using a guide I had found online.
This guide helped me achieve far greater performance for our product, as well as reduce shader compile times during development. I was able to disable many expensive rendering features (Lumen, Nanite, Substrate, etc) without compromising the game's visual integrity. After switching the rendering API to DirectX11 with the Forward Renderer, I saw a roughly 35% performance increase across the board. The removal of many unnecessary packages also helped with cutting down on the project's file size.
Once the project was uploaded to GitHub, I made a class map for our project's AI system.
For our next sprint, I will be looking into implementing a Boids AI system using Unreal Engine 5's C++ workflow. This will allow wildlife to school and behave as a flock without any performance concerns.
