When You See Me Cry

When You See Me Cry is a 3D adventure game heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. It was my forth game project at The Game Assembly and was the last project made using The Game Engine.

I was responsible for

• Tile system
• Tile tools
• Debug drawing
• Collisions/intersections
• Entity movement respecting boundaries
• Rooms
• Doors
• Entity door lock conditions

Collisions and the tile system was were most of my time was spent in this project. In the previous project Wolls, I created a tilemap which dramatically increased our performance for collision testing and rendering the level.

I sought to create something similar in When You See Me Cry, and the tiles differed from those in Wolls in that they also had a list with every overlapping game object. This list was used to optimize collision checking and limit updates in the world to objects in the current room.

This worked, but not very well given the time investment in maintenance and the fact that it wasn’t a problem that had to be solved. It was a case of premature optimization that I regret and I think a simpler solution would be to have a list of game objects per room volume instead.