Tax Return | My Site

General Information

Role

Lead Programmer

Period of Involvement

August 2025 - Present

Responsibilities

Implement primary gameplay and combat systems.
Provide technical insight during the design process of systems, levels, and enemies.
Resolve bugs encountered during playtesting sessions.
Assign and track tasks of other programmers to maintain development pace.

Notable Systems Developed

Early level designs had separate hitbox actors for events such as moving between platforms and spike damage. This approach was unsustainable as it added a significant amount of creation time to even smaller levels, so a different approach was required.

After some iteration, all interactions with the level map were baked directly into the tile map by offsetting collision layers. In this system, as shown below, platforms are offset towards the camera from the rest of the map, and hazards are pushsed backwards. Because Tax Return uses an orthographic camera, the player can move towards or away from the camera without affecting the relative scale.

Tax Return will feature a post-game, procedurally-generated "Endless Mode" where the player fights their way through as many rooms as possible without dying.

To generate the map, we are taking inspiration from aperiodic tiling sets, specifically the 32-tile set of Wang Tiles. This set of tiles was chosen for several reasons:

Four sets of "bonded" tiles that always appear next to each other creates natural locations for boss fights.
Tile-matching conditions dictate entry/exit options, including potential modifications for special rooms.
Several tiles share entry/exit configurations, allowing for separation into different room focuses, including combat, puzzle, and platforming.

This algorithm is being created in C++ to take advantage of bitmap storage to store tile information; as Unreal Engine 5 interfaces directly with C++ scripts and functions, this also better facilitates compatibility.

Some enemy encounters, such as the boss fight against the SRI's Digital Utilities Manager (DUM), employ attacks that are difficult to handle using conventional hitboxes; as an example, the DUM's "Authoritative Penmanship" attack is shown below.

For such attacks, Niagara particle systems are used to create more complex and/or dynamic appearances without losing function.

For this attack, the signature was converted into spline data and imported to Unreal Engine as a data table, a section of which is shown below. This data is passed to Niagara instances to create the appearance of a drawn signature; to improve performance, each instance generates up to 128 particles, depending on its relative length. Damage to the player is handled through traced collision data passed to a gameplay actor.