RUSH PARK

Details

Project Description
Rush Park is a fast-paced 2D sports brawler where players battle to dominate the arena with chaotic, high-speed ball physics and over-the-top action built in from scratch engine in C++. The engine included robust art and music pipelines, ensuring seamless integration across disciplines. Developing this engine required courses in real-time rendering and multimedia handling, but the result was a flexible and efficient framework that brought the team's creative vision to life. We ran into some problems with working on scenes simultaneously and, coupled with a setback from refactoring the engine, ultimately the game did not meet the vision after 6 weeks, but the engine was still a success. The architecture that we settled on was an entity-component system that resembles some commercial engines. The idea was to update each set of components independently from the entities they were associated with in order to save time retrieving from memory.

TRAILER

Technical Contributions
My primary technical contributions centered on building systems that ensured the engine ran smoothly. I developed player AI automated testing tools that pushed the engine to its limits, allowing us to soak-test game systems and catch issues before they reached designers or players. This included a metric data collecting portion that would output periodically to a cloud service for analysis. Additionally, I worked closely with artists and musicians to create pipelines that simplified the import and integration process, ensuring assets could move seamlessly from concept to implementation. These pipelines enhanced productivity by allowing artists to test their changes in-game easily without engineering assistance.

Leadership and Collaboration
As producer and team lead, I made it a priority to foster clear communication and efficient workflows across all disciplines. I overhauled our Discord server, transforming it into a focused platform for collaboration, and introduced a Kanban-style task tracking system using a whiteboard and sticky notes. These changes doubled team productivity and helped us stay organized throughout development. By blending agile-inspired practices with a fun and inclusive team environment, I ensured we delivered a game we were all proud of while supporting individual growth and creativity.