The Apprentice's Test

The game

You play a young mage sent to demolish magical anomalies left behind by a spell gone wrong. The game takes the same-colour group removal of classic bubble-shooter puzzles into first person, and adds rune drawing: hold the right mouse button, trace a symbol, and release to cast a spell that enchants the orbs or moves the puzzle so you can tackle it from another angle.

It was built by a team of three programmers and five game designers at Digital Bros Game Academy, alongside the final part of the DBGA Master Online in Game Programming.

What I programmed

• Gesture recognition. I built on Alex S.’s public Magician project, an Unreal Engine implementation of the $1 Unistroke Recognizer, and adapted it to recognise the runes players draw during gameplay.
• UI. I implemented the interface on the code side and also produced part of its graphic elements.
• Bug fixing. I fixed issues across the whole project, which meant reading and integrating code written by the other programmers.

I wrote almost all of my work in C++, and we also exposed parts of the workflow as Blueprints so the designers could work with them directly.

What I took away

Delivering a complete game by a fixed deadline, in a team where programmers and designers worked directly together, and building on third-party code without treating it as a black box.

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