An action rogue-like where you must grow stronger to vanquish the undead. Lichgate was the first game to come out of Coral Engine.

My Contributions

While I was mostly focused on maintaining and improving Coral Engine throughout this project, I also contributed directly towards the game.

• Flowfields: Implemented an optimised flowfield algorithm for AI navigation.
• Procedural Generation Tool: Developed tools for Level designers for generating endless, procedural levels.

Flowfields

Our game featured many enemies. Rather than calculating thousands of paths, I used flowfields for more optimised pathfinding.

The flowfield moves with the player and is updated asynchronously. The flowfield has multiple level of detail, allowing the flowfield to extend a greater distance while only being calculated at a lower resolution.

I later made a prototype for 3D flowfields in Unreal Engine, allowing agents to navigate any surface.

A single agent using the flowfield to move along any nearby surface towards the target.

⚠️ Arachnophobia Warning: Click to view

A swarm of spiders, climbing along walls and on eachother to reach the target.

Procedural Generation Tool

The tool worked by using a layering system; each layer can spawn a certain set of objects, and the level designer could manipulate the perlin noise to determine the frequency of the spawned objects.

The entire system is deterministic during a playthrough, each area will look consistent everytime the player returns.

The tool was used by our level designer, Nikola Tunev, to create the endless world.

The generation of the terrain has been optimised significantly and can keep up with the fastests of players, even with the sheer ridiculousness of the endgame movement speed,