Teenage Mutants Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed
Teenage Mutants Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed is an Action/Adventure game developed by AheartfulOfGames and published by Outright Games. The game was developed with Unity Engine and a proprietary framework for action games written in C#.
I enter on this project on 2023, at the beginning of the production and work on it until it’s release a year and a half later.
When I began at aHeartfulOfGames I filled the role of Generalist Programmer. Later in development move to the position of Technical Designer.
Programmer work
The “code” division of the studio was small so everyone in the team needed to be flexible and work on different task: implementation of new feature, bugfixing, improves to the test suite…
I feel specially proud of the tools I build for the project. This tools allow the design and art team to work faster and without the need of programmers stepping to integrate their job into the engine. The biggest of those tools are the following:- Combat Visualization Tool: This tool display the animations of the game characters along with the combat-related animations like hitboxes and particle effects. This greatly accelerated the work of the combat designers as previously the only way of visualizing this values was executing the game.
- Dialogue Tool: This tool allow the creations of cutscenes that include dialogue box and character animations. The tool went through several iterations. The final version was integrated into Unity’s Timeline system through the use of custom track that allow the designer to control the timing of the cutscene’s events visually.
Technical Designer
As Technical Designer, I serve as a bridge between the designers and the game code. I was given the high level design of the systems and my jobs was define it at a low level and then implement it into the game.
I implemented the two power up systems of the game: the Mutagens and the Fortunes. For both system I received a list of the power ups, but without any specific values (example: “Items spawn probability increased” rather than “Items spawn 1.5 times more frequently”). My job was not only to add the power ups into the game (using and extending our existing systems) but also to define and balance them.
In a similar note I worked on the Dojo Missions, fighting challenges were the player has to face groups of enemies under specific circumstances, like a time limit or reduced health. Like with the Mutagens and Fortunes I was tasked to define the rules of the challenges and before implementing them into the game.
My bigger contribution for the project as Technical Designer was to build the Highway Area. The highway is a recurring section of different missions where the players must defeat a group of enemies while riding on top of cars and trucks that travel at high speed. The vehicles enter and exit the play area, forcing the player to move constantly.
The game includes 5 visits to the highway (4 on main missions and one on a side mission). Each visit present a different pattern of enemies and vehicles.
I work on this sections from the beginning to end, starting with planing the areas on paper to then build it into the engine. I iterate the levels multiple times until they reach the state seen in the final game. I didn't work alone, though, as I had help from other designers and the visual dressign was made by the art department.
