MERKS

ROLE

MAIN PROGRAMMER 

ENGINE

UNREAL ENGINE 4

PLATFORM

UNANNOUNCED

RELEASE DATE

UNANNOUNCED

MERKS is built from the ground up as a new approach of the classic tower defence scheme. Surrounded by a dystopian atmosphere, the player will have to complete a wide variety of missions using their robots known as Landers, which can be acquired, modified or sold in order to create their own and unique squad intended to face the dangers menacing humankind… or just make good money.

MERKS was developed by a handful of developers, some veterans, and other newbies, focused in making a game with a different approach to classic genres and with a high speed on production and growth.

In this video you can see a full game (9 min) in which the Slithers (enemies) have one point of spawn in the north-east of the map and they have to destroy the base situated in the south-west. Our duty is to defend the building from the waves of enemies while we explore the map and get some loot.

DUTIES

AS MAIN PROGRAMMER

  • Core Engine Architecture: establish the code bases for the project and design the whole game architecture with modular components for maximum flexibility. Using independent UE modules and components to avoid dependencies and speed up the content production and game iteration.
  • Attributes/stats system: all the units of the game use a set of attributes and stats to manage all kind of things like life, energy, shield, attack speed, move speed, damage, defense etc. The system allows designers to create the attributes from the editor in a DataTable and to set-up how they affect the stats.
  • Orders: all the “actions” in the game where managed by Orders. This structure managed the flow and priorities of the game.
  • Abilities/Effects/Behaviours system: the orders execute abilities and this, in turn, execute effects. This system was the most complex. There were different types of abilities and effects each one of them with their own custom settings from the editor in DataTables. The effects can execute more effects or behaviours.
    The abilities and effects are related to each other getting different outputs with their configuration. All this system also works with de attribute/stats one through the unit owner.
  • Items: The units can be customized with items; items can modify the attributes/stats and also add/remove/lock abilities. Items can be broken during a game and the unit will lose all the benefits. They can also be repaired thus returning the benefits to the unit.
  • Crafting: You can craft new items of different tiers in exchange of some resources you get during the games. The crafting system is totally customized from the editor.
  • Data Driven: All the above systems are fully configurable from Data Tables and user-friendly for the designers to use. That greatly improves the iteration and production, thus avoiding having a lot of BluePrints.
  • Supervise the work of the other programmers.
  • Support technical design.