Description:

Animal Shelter Simulator is a game available on Steam that allows players to experience the rewarding work of managing an animal shelter. In this game, players take on the role of a shelter manager responsible for rescuing, nurturing, and finding new homes for cats and dogs. The gameplay involves tasks like feeding, playing with the animals, as well as treating any injuries or illnesses they may have. Players must also handle administrative tasks such as upgrading facilities and balancing the shelter’s budget. 

Team size: 

13 people

When I joined the team for Animal Shelter Simulator I quickly became the designated AI programmer for the project. I refactored the codebase to fit the needs of the growing team for creating content. Not only I managed to simplify the workflow for the behavior selection and adding new behaviors, but also implemented a tool that would allow the design team to easily define the flow of the states in the game.

My Finite state Machine solution not only provided streamlined API endpoints for programmers, but also a simple visual tool, based on unity's animation controller state machines to allow the designers to have a full control over the states and their logic.

The main responsibility I had working on Animal Shelter Simulator was collaboration with the design team to implement specific gameplay mechanics and AI behaviors based on the documentation provided (design/iteration docs). The features that I worked on were:

• Interactions in the world

• UI elements and  their functionalities

• Horse Riding (for the horse DLC)

• Pets customization.

• AI actions and behaviors.

• Interactions between animals.

From the start I was responsible for maitaining, developing, improving and bug fixing multiple existing gameplay systems, while communicating with the QA departament, as well as other programmers, this required quick learning of the codebase, as oftentimes I fixed bugs in systems I have not worked with much in the past.  The technical documentation I contributed to during my work in the project helped onboard an entire team of new programmers working on the game to this day. The documentation covered both the existing systems and APIs, but also the style guides of the project and how to use proprietary tools created for the project.

While working on Animal Shelter Simulator I contributed to the process of creating a QA and bug reporting pipeline: I created a tool that replaced the text-input-based debugging console and make the non-technical testers' lives easier. Moreover I helped to create a proprietary tool for logging. Last, but not least I helped set up and monitored Unity's cloud diagnostics tool that helped us improve the game when it was released to the general public of gamers.