The Current is a rogue-like deckbuilding RPG with a unique tile based combat, developed by Bird Island / Portaplay. 

Engine: Unity

Platforms: PC

Development time: April 2023 - December 2024 (Alpha milestone)

The game is set in a futuristic post-cataclysm Terra world, which is mostly covered by sea level. The player navigates between different islands encountering robotic hostile entities in an attempt to restablish contact between Terra and the Moon colony where they and their crew originate from. It has a run-based structure with 3D exploration and narrative elements that persist between runs.

The production reached an alpha status milestone but is currently on pause.

I worked on the project for multiple shorter sprints throughout its production as I was primarily tasked with other projects during most of that period. I assisted the team with the development of core gameplay features, tools and systems as well as debugging duties, especially during the prepaparation of the various milestone builds.

 Some examples of features/tasks that I worked on: 

• A Google sheet syncing system that easily pulls data defined in google sheets and creates or updates equivalent entities (scriptable objects) and their values in the Unity project. The system was generic enough to be used for most of the core data of the game like the combat tiles, items and abilities. It allowed the design team to easily tweak and sync values and descriptions from their large sheets database into the game. 
• A reward distribution system that the design team used to define possible tile, skill or item rewards for the player after combat or other events. For the tile rewards specifically  random pooling options were created (e.g based on rarity) that could be easily defined per encounter. 
• An "explorable encounter" pooling and spawning system. I implemented a method for the design team to define/adjust the pools of small isolated random events throughout the different islands and be able to randomize their positions according to filtering criteria
• A tooltip system when hovering certain keywords in TextMeshPro dialogue or icons, that inform the player of gameplay functionality or narrative reminders. The system allowed the content team to define the keywords and content themselves as SOs and inject easily into any text description via specific syntax. I developed both the underlying system and guide, but also most of the display UI for all the terms.
• A simple enemy intention display that connected the underlying combat system data with the UI scene systems.

New technologies/methods that I got familiar with during this project:

• Google sheet API and connection syncing with Unity
• TextMeshPro hyperlinks
• Deck building combat architecture