I was responsible for determining how the player ship would move and fight. Some key pillars of Riptides intent was that the players ship felt like it has mass and inertia and that their positioning relative to the enemy would matter in combat. 

These pillars led to two game mechanics, ship acceleration and firing arcs.

Whenever the player tries to move, either to turn or increase their speed, the ship takes some time to reach the intended speed. When the player turns the turn begins slowly, when the player attempts to speed up or slow down it take time before the player reaches their chosen speed. This gives the feeling that the player ship is large, and that it takes a good amount of energy or effort to move it around. This also means that the player has to commit to each of their moves and plan ahead as it is possible to over shoot a turn, or run into an obstacle by not slowing down in time. 

Firing arcs refer to the mechanic where each of the players guns has a limited area where they can fire. The front two guns can only fire 180 degrees ahead of the ship, and the two rear guns can only fire 180 behind. This means that what weapons the player has facing the enemy matters, as they are the only ones they can use. It also means that the only way to get the most damage out of any loadout is to face near perpendicular to the enemy. 

I was responsible for implementing the technical side of the level select screen. The screen involved 3 separate parts. The Radar map, which displayed the unlocked levels and had a moving cross hair to show which level was selected. The Level selector themselves, which were a separate widget that contained information for the upcoming level and updated themselves based on whether the level was unlocked or not. And finally the info screen, which displayed a short description of the level and an icon.

When the player entered the level select screen, they could freely select any unlocked level. Once selected the "crosshair" would move across the radar screen to center on the selected level. The info screen would display the information of any moused over level selector. If nothing was moused over the screen would be blank or display the information of the selected level. Finally, to enter the level the player would click the big red button on the bottom right.

The final piece of my contribution to Riptide's development was balance work on the different weapons and components.  This proved somewhat tricky as the weapons and components were in different states of implementation over most of development and testing time commonly had to be allocated to higher priority topics.  When approaching a weapon or component, my goal was to make each be unique from all of the others, as well as have a relatively clear niche within a players loadout. The railguns are the best example of this, as they were one of the first two weapons added. The began as a  reliable slow firing high damage weapon to complement the faster autocannons. However this role was eventually taken over by the long guns. As such the fire rate of the railgun was greatly reduced, and its damage increased. The speed at which its projectile traveled was also increased. This turned the railgun into a long range high damage weapon good for taking out targets from far away, but mostly useless against faster enemies at close range.

I was responsible for writing and update Riptide's Game Design Document. While parts of the document are pulled from other team members work, most of the document is my own work. There are several sections that link to other documents that provide the viewer more in depth information about a particular concept within the project. Otherwise, all content is categorized into a wider section based on how they fit into the project, with the two largest being Game States, which describe each of the game's scenes and the Mechanics and Systems section which breaks down the games features. I created a number of visuals for different sections of the document to provide more information. Some of these were created from scratch while other we built using in engine screenshots or existing art assets.