barton lynch pro surfing
Barton Lynch Pro Surfing is an action sports game that was released on Steam, PS5 and XSX. You can create your own custom surfer, or choose from a range of famous pro surfers. You could play through a WSL-style tournament, or choose free surf and explore 12 beaches available.
I joined this project in 2020 as a fresh graduate, so I was thrown straight into the deep end of professional game development and had to quickly pick up new skills and compentencies. Some of these areas included Shaders, UX, Sound Design, and Console Development.
Studio:
Year:
Bungarra Software
2020-2023
Conjured Using:
UNITY
ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR
AUDACITY
The first contribution was a "flocking system" for the NPCs that roamed the beaches. In order to reduce the performance costs inherent with pathfinding, the system that allowed NPCs to share their navigational data with other NPCs.
Another responsibility included improving the AI that the player would compete against during the rounds. I employed an algorithm similar to A* that scored the surrounding area of the AI based on the waves condition (e.g. height, angle, distance to tube). This allowed for an organic decision making process that allowed the AI to navigate the waves without explicitly telling them where to surf.
For the console ports, I was single-handedly in charge of getting the game to run on the 9th-gen consoles (PS5 and XSX). This required implementing the appropriate SDK's, optimizing performance, and submitting the publishing requests.
