Guardian of the Gears is a 3D puzzle adventure game where you navigate and control an interactive environment in order to breathe life back into a decaying world.

Download Guardian of the Gears

Developed in Unreal Engine 4

E3 2017 College Game Competition Finalist

IGF 2018 Best Student Game Finalist

Featured at PAX West 2017 DigiPen Booth

My role as Technical Director:

Provided support for design, art, and sound by integrating content into the game. Designed and developed an interactive movement system with the ability to bidirectionally chain actions between various objects. Implemented various large gameplay systems and features. Created visual effects and particles and applied them to animations and environments.

Interactive Movement System:

Once we knew we were going to focus on puzzles that involved moving large chunks of the world I started to develop a system that would make it easy for team members to trigger, link, chain, and add timed effects to objects in the world.

The interactive movement system was simple enough for both designers and artists to use allowing for a smooth transition from white boxing to a full art pass. Artists were also able to modify the existing puzzle that designers setup to link background objects to move in time with the main puzzle pieces. Our sound designer was also able to add sounds triggered in time with the moving objects.

The interactive movement system also handled moving all chained objects back to their original positions in reverse order.

Visual Effects and Particles:

I created ambient particles such as a dust particle system. There's a spot on level 1 where the dust particles even feed into a small twister.

I also created particles and effects for the player and boss animations. I then added them into the animations themselves in Unreal to ensure proper placement and timing.

The boss level needed a portal that would fluctuate in intensity as you progressed. The portal was a combination of a complex particle system tied to blueprints that would trigger various parts of the portal to make it more intense.

I created more generic particles to add to the visual appeal of the levels and the various moving parts of the world.