DARE ACADEMY 2018 WINNER
Summary
Kinoko is an exploration-based adventure where the player performs various tasks to turn winter to spring.
When recruited in the project’s final months, I was tasked with bringing everything regarding UI to the game. As work progressed, I would start to enter a more generalist programming role, where I would find ways to add little flourishes to the game’s presentation through particles, animation manipulation, camera work and extra mechanics, along with directing and implementing the game’s cinematics.
What I Did
Menus – Programming, UI, Animations
Dialogues – Programming, UI, Illustrations
Butterflies – Particles and Material
The radial particle system, used for the outro. 
Butterfly static mesh with animated material applied. 
Wings are animated with a masked positional offset on the vertices.
Objectives
Basalt – Particles and UI
Tree – Particles and UI
Snow Pile – Material and UI
UX
Smoothing
One problem that the character had was while the camera tracking it was smooth, the mesh would pop on the vertical axis as it traversed uneven terrain, compromising the feel of controlling an actual character.
To mitigate this, instead of the character mesh precisely matching the vertical transform of the capsule, it would interpolate to it instead. This is tightened when the capsule collider is airborne.
Without Smoothing – The character snaps to the height of uneven ground. 
With Smoothing – Notice how the character also leans into their turns.
I wanted to get more play out of the animations as there wasn’t much weight felt whenever the player turned the character. I added leaning to the character mesh which would increase intensity depending on how fast the character was turning.
I also utilised a two-bone IK system to place the feet on the ground, targets were updated with animation notifies while weights were updated with animation curves.
Cave Lighting
Map – Programming, UI
Map Dialogue – Programming, UI, Particles
Robert J Harper 