Beam Me Up internship, Pinball demo
— PROJECT NAME
VR internship at Beam Me Up
— ROLE
Gameplay programmer
— DATE AND AFFILIATION
2021, Beam Me Up
Internship in which I was tasked with programming the gameplay of a few VR minigames, which are part of a bigger project.
I was tasked with two pinball machines, air hockey and shuffleboard.
What I worked on
Refactoring, debugging and editing pinball machines from PC to VR, as well as adding VR functionality to them.
Creating a air hockey game system.
Creating a shuffleboard game system.
Documentation for every game system.
Beam Me Up internship, Air Hockey demo
What I learned
Refactoring the pinball machines made me learn a lot of new programming methods, as well as creating simple save systems for scores. The whole internship had me learn new functions for C# in Unity all around, and I also learned to fix some VR bugs in Unity which only existed on that version of the engine.
Beam Me Up internship, Shuffleboard demo
Challenges
My first task was to port pinball machines from PC to VR. For this, I had to learn how it was programmed and understand how it worked, through the dozens of existing scripts and thousands of lines of code these could contain. After a few days I had grasped enough to start converting it and fix the bugs that were already present in the script.
The shuffleboard was an interesting challenge. I was trying to find a way to propel the puck with a push, but having a stick with colliders would have unpredictable results, even when ignoring terrain. In the end and since my internship was nearing its end I decided to go with a prehension zone that would latch the puck unto its XZ velocity.
