In Harmony is an action-RPG for the XboxOne built using Unreal Engine 4 and UWP. It follows the story of a young dancer who can use dance moves to affect objects in the world around her.
   Because the particular branch of UE4 that allowed us to build to UWP lacked a functional blueprint nativizer, we had to build as much of our game as possible in C++. I was responsible for integrating various visual effects into the C++ code of various classes. This included adding in lip syncing for the main character, hooking a cloth ribbon up to the player’s health bar so that the ribbon slowly burned up as the player’s health decreased, and a specially built dynamic material for the game’s interactable objects. This material had a pulsing glow effect with a wide variety of parameters as well as three textures which could be swapped out at runtime to mimic other textures in the game and could be set individually for different objects and changed at runtime either individually, or to different presets.
   I also implemented a multi-step tutorial box, which allowed the designers to designate a series of actions to perform on specific objects. When the player is then within the box, the tutorial creates UI popups over the objects in order, switching to the next prompt when the player performs the action and turning off when It’s run out of actions. I also became involved with the ensuring the game worked properly on Xbox One, helping to both profile and optimize the render thread by identifying particle systems that were causing major performance hits and finding a way to optimize our landscape to allow for more aggressive LODing.

   In Harmony is available for download on the Microsoft store page.