PlayStation5 Game Engine
Due to an academic disclosure agreement (ADA), I cannot share access to the GitHub repository or code snippets for this project.
Video demonstration of the distributable game package.
Throughout my third year of studies at Sheffield Hallam University, students were tasked to develop a PlayStation5 renderer, engine, and game prototype within a team. My team consisted of 2 other programmers, 2 artists, and 1 designer. After individually developing a base renderer, students were required to research and implement three additional features, model loading, texture loading, and a topic of choice to form the framework for the group project.
My primary responsibilities for this project included advanced low-level C++ programming to implement engine, editor, and gameplay features whilst managing the team's workflow and time management using Trello with the Everhour powerup.
I solely developed the collision system alongside adding shaded and wireframe render passes. I also heavily contributed to scene management, JSON serialisation and parsing, and hot-reloading. Additionally, for our group to get into the highest grade boundary, we were required to package our prototype into a distributable release so I spent some time learning this whilst other team members finalised game polishing.
In addition to the main project of the module, no engine can be complete without some documentation. Our team of programmers developed a technical design document, extensive test plan, engine documentation, and adhere to a set of requirements defined by Sony.
The image is a image snippet from the submitted documentation for the project, explaining the differentiation between states. The project had an abstraction for easily adding new states and transitions and consisted of 4 states:
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Editor State
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Title State
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Runtime State
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End State
The editor state allows free movement for the camera and acts as a creative mode to add, edit, or remove game objects from the scene. The runtime state runs the main gameplay loop and all systems (e.g., physics/collision). The title and end states are states representing the main menu and 'game complete/over' screen.
My biggest challenge for this project was adapting to the learning curve. Until this point, I struggled grasping low-level concepts and 3D graphics however, with some perseverance, documentation, and sample code, I began to understand the finer details of the graphics pipeline and the process of rendering frames. I had also never used shaders before, so to be able to test, break, and fix PlayStation shaders was incredibly beneficial to truly understand and love 3D graphics.
Our biggest challenge as a team was to effectively manage time given the heavy workload whilst learning the PlayStation5 Developer SDK. We encountered scope-creep many times requiring us to stop and adapt to the project's priorities.
Overall, our engine featured:
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Entity Component System
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Model & texture loading
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Audio
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Lighting
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Shadow mapping
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Collision
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Scene management
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Level editor
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JSON serialisation and parsing
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Hot-reloading for models and textures
This project was weighted 3/4 on individual contribution and 1/4 on the delivered prototype. The programming team were individually graded above 70%, and I personally achieved 81%.