Homeseek is a post-apocalyptic survival strategy game set on a dystopian, resource-strapped Earth at the beginning of the next century.
It was developed by Traptics and published by The Iterative Collective on Steam.
As part of Traptics, I was assigned with the implementation of the User Interface (UI), an integral part of the communication between the game and the player in strategy games.
In this genre, the UI is essential to the gameplay mechanics, thus I was determined on making it as polished as possible. Working closely with the UI / UX designer and the lead Developer was key to bringing the team’s vision to life as well.
Due to the scale of the project, it was also crucial to be coordinated with other team members to ensure a fluent development cycle even in tight deadlines. Having joined the studio when the game was already in progress, this was a new challenge to conquer.
Skills obtained:
- Adapting to the pre-existing systems while evolving and creating new ones.
- Working on a large-scale project
- Tasks management
- Implementing from Figma (collaborative interface design tool) to Unity
- Profiling performance through the Unity Profiler
- UI animations
- Managing Localization
Challenges:
- Due to the massive number of images required it would be performance heavy to have them as independent instances
- Updating the Sprite sheets independently could result in conflicts when merging branches
Solutions:
- Sprite sheets allow multiple images to be considered as one draw call
- Having a single branch for the Sprite sheets. When an update was needed, this branch was updated and merged with the rest
