Sucker Succor

Sucker Succor is a real-time strategy (RTS game made in Unity using C#.  In this game, the player controls an underwater “tentacle monster”, rooted in place, interacting with an active world, consisting of over 200 agents at once, moving around the creature. This game is purposely a departure from traditional control schemes and main character roles.

Programming

One of the key aspects of this game was an “alive” environment and complex AI. There are six total non-player characters, and each one has a robust finite-state-machine to control its behavior. To make the code simple and flexible, the types of interactions (attacking, grabbing, etc.) between the different characters and the player had to be planned and thought through well in advance of the actual coding.

I built a custom physics simulator which was used for all the characters. Each character is made up of several physics nodes which together form the “skeleton” of each moving entity (i.e. tentacles, wings, fish) Originally, the physics simulation was exclusively for the player’s tentacles, but it became clear that expanding the nodes to work for every creature would make the game’s logic more uniform. Because the physics needed to be flexible, each creature’s movement (i.e. wings flapping) became very involved. Each creature’s attributes went through several iterations of testing to perfect their movement and behavior.

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Art Direction

Because of the dynamic way the entities moved, traditional animation was not feasible. I opted to use primarily procedural animation. A mix of line renderers, plain sprites, and mesh manipulation allowed me to properly visualize the complex simulation.