Now that Sleeping Dogs is out, the next game to be released that I had the pleasure of working on will be a title named Capsized+. This was the game I worked on before coming to my current job.
This was my first foray into tablet and mobile gaming. Originally, Capsized was a PC game released on Steam. Someone decided to bring the game to tablets and other platforms. Because a PC game and a tablet/mobile game use different type of controls, there was a lot of work done to make the game work and play great on something like an iPad. The team was small so there was a chance to work all different aspects of the game.
One of the things I got to fix is something you can see at about 1:23 into the trailer above. If you maximize the video, you’ll notice that as the character rotates his arms around to aim, his arms actually rotates out of his shoulder socket. The cause of this was because the arm wasn’t setup to animate properly. I remember getting the initial task to fix this and not having a clue as to how to start. So far, in my career, I haven’t had a lot of animation experience so I didn’t know instinctively where to look for the problem. I did a ton of digging and experimenting but I eventually figured out what the problem was. It was a lot of work but I fixed the damn problem. The game looks a lot better now because the main character doesn’t look like he’s dislocating his shoulder all the time.
I also worked on the code that enables in-game ads. I know this isn’t usually something people like to see in their games but its a standard part of mobile and tablet gaming. In a weird way, it was very cool to get that code working and to see how ads are used in this type of platform. I was able to work on many other different aspects of the game, so at least from that standpoint, it was really cool.
Capsized+ should be out this fall and I’m very excited to see on the virtual store shelves!