Undying Consciousness

Eleven months, three people, and an engine none of us had shipped anything in before.

Undying Consciousness came out of Endless Studios Cohort 5, a capstone programme where teams build an original game under daily guidance from working developers. I took the lead programmer role, which in a team of three meant owning essentially all of the gameplay code.

What we delivered was a vertical slice: a short section of the game with traversal, combat, AI and destruction all working together.

The loop

Three loops feeding each other rather than one linear chain:

• Explore: reach a new area, talk to someone, wander it.
• Combat: an encounter or ambush interrupts the exploring; fight, survive.
• Unravel: surviving opens dialogue, which unravels a mystery, which progresses the story and unlocks the puzzle that opens the next area.

Combat interrupts exploration instead of being a separate mode, so the AI had to stay readable while the player was mid-traversal.

Motion warping and parkour

The traversal system was the hardest part and the piece I’m most attached to. Parkour animations look wrong the moment the character’s hands don’t land where the geometry actually is. Unreal’s motion warping lets you retarget an animation’s root motion at runtime toward a real target in the world, so a vault animation authored against one ledge height adapts to whatever the player actually ran at.

Getting it to look right took a lot of tuning of the warp targets.

Enemy AI and destructible environments

The enemy AI was kept basic: enemies move around the level without getting stuck. Parts of the level break apart, set up with Unreal’s fracture tools.

Optimisation

Builds were slowing the team down, so I worked on bringing build times down, along with runtime performance. It was less visible than the traversal work, but it meant the whole team could test changes faster.

Outcome

The game ranked first in the cohort at the end-of-programme showcase, in a public hall with players, attendees, and investors trying every project on the floor. Afterwards the team was invited onto a panel to talk through the game and how we built it, in front of a live audience.