Poppy Playtime Chapter 3

I want to give some context on the boss itself before breaking down my work on it. CatNap is part of a toy line "Smiling Critters" which are stuffed animals with open mouths that emit a scent to help stimulate a sensation with CatNap helping induce sleep. This character has been stalking the player around since the start of the chapter spewing his gas on them to make them hallucinate. He is the first toy to worship the main antagonist, The Prototype, as a god.
The previous 2 chapters had their final boss be an escape sequence, and with I wanted to subvert expectations by creating a survival scenario after faking out an escape sequence. You are trapped in a makeshift panic room with gradually failing security measures while you frantically have to distinguish what is real and what is gas-induced hallucinations.

• Worked with the director to create an original concept for it and further refine the gameplay loop though multiple rounds of iteration

  • Have 4 corridors the player must defend to stop CatNap from entering the room by using power poles for temporary defense or limited quantity batteries for a more permanent defense

  • Use Flares to check which CatNap is real

  • Create a paranoia system that will alter the camera as you state at CatNap and lowers with successful counter attacks

• Work with Tech Art, 2D Art, and Animation to work on effects to sell the paranoia

  • Desaturate colors when you look at CatNap

  • Add a growing tilt to the camera when looking at CatNap

• Write design documents to help keep all teams working on it aligned and on track

• Host playtests and record feedback

• Use all Grabpack hands in the encounter as a way to test the players mastery of core gameplay elements

• Video of the encounter:

  • Chase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqmcs9MChEQ

  • Panic Room: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCHHJkoqqK0

She is an Weeping Angel inspired enemy that only moves when you aren't looking at her or when she's in the dark. I worked a lot with the Animation team to get the most out of limited animations to help sell how poor she was at hiding the fact that she was alive. I pushed to bring more audio ques to let players know when she was in getting closer, reached her kill range, and to play a raising sound to notify she was about to jumpscare/kill the player. Since the team was mostly new to Unreal or game design as a whole on those teams a lot of the work here helped them better understand what the designers and programmers can provide for them.

• Vector math to decide if the player could currently see the teacher based off bones with a priority system to cut down on number of calculations

• Light system that used a light, and box component to let the AI know when the lights were on and off

• Use of Anim notifies to make sure she only stopped moving when both feet were planted

• Additive animation to make sure she always jolted a bit when you looked at her while she was moving

• Save/Load functionality for the entire sequence

• Sequencer set-up/ownership for introduction and ending cut-scene to enable/disable the AI functionality

• Timestamped link to her encounter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pevFFxQlr6E

These enemies are from the same toy line as CatNap but were not part of the "Bigger Bodies Initiative" so they are the size of your standard mid sized plush. The goal with this enemy was to make creepy little crawling enemies that could swarm the enemy in greater amounts.

• Work with VFX and Animation to Create performant hordes can could be reused in sequencer

• Handle movement and obstacle traversals with a navmesh and nav-link-proxies

• Custom spawners what parameters for: spawn rate, max spawn count, and which critters can spawn

• Iterate on their attacks to create something easy to understand for players

• Timestamped link to their most prevalent section: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pevFFxQlr6E

Due to my lead moving to another internal project before we were wrapping up pre-production I worked with the director and level designers to iterate on how the levels played out. We worked through this by having the LDs make rough prototypes of one off mechanics that I would later go back and either convert to C++ or just make it a more flexible BP. For more cinematic moments I would be the one to create and implement a more dynamic spline system that UE5s default and do any and all sequencer related clean-up/required scripting.

This position on the team lead me to having some level of over site on every section of the game. I wrote design documents, asset request lists, and worked with production to create a priority order for these tasks. I pride myself on not only working with every team but giving and pushing individual contributors to give their feedback or concerns so we could avoid any further crunch and ensure we released the best product we could.

• Using my spline system and with a lot of collaboration with Narrative I made the cable car ride into Playcare (Hub area) link

• Using a system set up by my lead I handled all most transitions in and out of Playcare. Mentored a junior programmer in how to use the system so they could maintain it while I handled AI bugs.

• Level scripting, collaborative iteration, load/save, and ownership of technical bugs for for the entity of Home Sweet Home, The School, and The Playhouse.