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THE GAME
The game

Role: Game Developer

Platform: iOS

Engine: Unity

Company: Grand Cru

Release Date: June 2014

Game Summary: Supernauts is a multiplayer game where players use blocks to build their own planets. With the help of the small robot Sinclair, players can use more than 40 different materials to create the shiniest turf in the Supernauts universe. Players can also collaborate with thousands of other players to build incredible creations, and compete in team-based tournaments where only the universe's best crafters will prevail. 

GAMEPLAY
Gameplay Trailer
My Role at Grand Cru
MY ROLE AT GRAND CRU

About me: I started working at Grand Cru as a programming intern in the summer of 2013. After three months in the company I was offered a permanent position as a Game Programmer, and went on to collaborate with the Lead Client Developer to create the systems and menus for the multiplayer mode. Over my stay at Grand Cru I worked on almost every game system: the game's shop, the world rankings, the player cards, the mission UI, the life support system...I loved working there, but in 2014 I received a scholarship to do a Master's degree in Interactive Technology, which brought me to the SMU Guildhall and the US!

My Work
MY WORK

The multiplayer teams

  • One of the biggest projects I worked on was the team systems. Supernauts had a multiplayer weekly tournament, where players could team up and compete against other teams to make the best creations with the blocks they have gathered during the week.

In the tournaments, teams competed to make the best creation every week. 

  • As the person in charge of implementing the client side of the team system, I created the team structs, and the functions requested all team-related info to the database. Once the information reached the client, I used it for several purposes, including creating team rankings, teleporting players to tournament worlds, and displaying detailed information about teams' members.

The Tournament Menu dealt with massive amounts of information, that I had to sort and display appropriately.

  • As part of my work I had to code the Tournament Menu, the most complex UI in Supernauts. The menu asked the server for the teams' information, and then used the information to create a ranking of teams, and to display detailed information about each team (team members, medals, worlds, Captains...). The menu also asked for all information regarding past contests, which I then organized and displayed, showing which teams had won each contest and providing a link to the wining worlds.

UI work

  • During my stay at Grand Cru I coded a part of almost every menu or dialog in the game. Some of the menus that I worked on include the Shop, the HUD, the Player Cards, the tournament shipments menu, the material-making menu, the life-support menu, and the reward menu, among others.

As a programmer I worked on many of the game's interfaces.

Adapting the UI to iPhone

  • One of the biggest challenges of Supernauts was adapting the UI (created for iPad) to iPhone. The iPhone's screen is considerably smaller than the iPad's screen, and we quickly found that we had to reduce screen cluttering by almost 50% for the iPhone alone. My work was both coding and collaborating with the artists to design and implement the iPhone's UI.

iPad version of the World Ranking Menu.

Localizations

iPhone version of the World Ranking Menu.

  • My localizations work included choosing a localization company, that would translate the game to all languages. In addition to that, I made sure that all interfaces were ready for all different languages, and I supervised and tweak the Spanish localization for the game. 

Spanish sentences are longer than English sentences, so I had to adapt menus so that they accepted sentences of varying lengths.

  • One of the menus that required the most work was the Shipment menu. The Shipment Menu created random sentences in English, following simple English grammar rules. Using a spreadsheet with grammar rules, I had to create a script that would create grammar-sound random sentences in almost eight different languages.

The Shipment Menu creates random sentences from a pool of several verbs, subjects and nouns.

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