C#/Unity experienced developer

[orfen]

Hello everybody, i just found out about this amazing project you guys have been working on. I've just binge watched black sails and i remembered how amazed i was when i played the PoTC game back in '03, and i was looking for another good pirate game to play. From my sort search, it seems that your game promises to be probably one of the best of the genre. As such, i would love to help in any way i can in the development of the game.

About me:
I have worked with Unity professionally for about 2 years, making mobile games and applications, and i consider myself to know the development part of the engine pretty well. I don't have that much experience with the physics part of it since we never really used the engine physics in the projects i have worked on, but i think i'm pretty on point in everything else. I imagine you guys already have something set up, but i also have an asset server set up for my personal projects if it interests you. The only thing that really made me consider posting here, is availability. I am currently unemployed but i will probably have a job pretty soon, so i don't know how much time i will be able to spend on the project, but i figured since this is a community effort, i might as well post here, even if could be of use to you with just fixing bugs when i can. I would love to do more than that and have a part in developing/expanding main features, but i can't guarantee that i will have the time for that. That's pretty much it i guess. If you have any questions or want any clarifications, i'd be happy to answer!

 

[Thagarr]

Ahoy @orfen, welcome aboard mate!

We certainly can use someone with your skill set, and any time that you can spare to help us in our efforts is greatly appreciated. @JohnSilver is our programing coordinator, he is a bit short on free time at the moment, but he should be along shortly. In the meantime, if you have not done so already, you might have a read back through a couple of latest Dev Blogs over on IndieDB, or have a playthrough of some of the recent demos in the downloads section. That should give you an idea of where we stand with the project at the moment.

 

[JohnSilver]

Hi @orfen,

Always glad to have someone with some professional Unity experience on board.

Here are a couple things that I think would be great if you could contribute on, but if this outside your element let know and we can look for other areas:

• shaders, we have been burned by relying on too many shader assets in the past, going forward we want to develop our own shaders or isolate those that we need
• cloth physics for sails and/or rigging animations in Unity
• particle effects, again we became bogged down in using a number of particle effects packages, the goal is reduce dependencies and/or write our own
• character animations - most of our character animation set is covered but we are still looking for custom animations for cannon loading, ship activity and other things
• AI, writing behaviour trees for character activities [patrolling, searching, hunting, stealing, hiding and so on]

Let me know what your interests are?

This week we have a developer who just joined the project a couple months ago releasing a new POC test project focused on ships gunnery and an AI auto fire feature. I was thinking we could get you working on that project and help out with some of the those above items.

Cheers,

JS

 

[orfen]

Hello @JohnSilver ,

Unfortunately i have no experience with shader coding, so i don't think i would be able to contribute anything tangible to that. Regarding cloth physics, i am aware of the new physics system introduced in Unity 5, but i haven't had the opportunity to use it or work with it, however it would be something i am interested in. Regarding character animations and particles, i have very limited experience with that so i'm afraid i won't be of much help either. I could definitely contribute with the AI behaviour trees and general scripting.
What would interest me more is probably event/quest scripting, as well as things related to inventory/looting/equipment scripting and the equivalent UI scripting. I have a lot of experience in UI scripting using NGUI(if it's not something you know, you should definitely check it out, it's a UI package created by the developer of Windward), so i could be of use there as well. I understand that some of the things i mentioned being more comfortable with may be out of the scope of the project for now, so in general i would say i can try and help with whatever you need at the moment, but if it's more focused towards animation, my skillset would be limited.

I'm up to working on the POC, if you think what i have to offer is best suited to it. Let me know what you think.

Regards,
Orfen

 

[JohnSilver]

Hey @orfen,

Regarding cloth physics, i am aware of the new physics system introduced in Unity 5, but i haven't had the opportunity to use it or work with it, however it would be something i am interested in.

Working on the cloth sounds like a good start. We will get you working with Bleash on the gunnery project. Today, I will be releasing that version and it may be helpful if download it and have a quick play through.

What would interest me more is probably event/quest scripting, as well as things related to inventory/looting/equipment scripting and the equivalent UI scripting. I have a lot of experience in UI scripting using NGUI(if it's not something you know, you should definitely check it out, it's a UI package created by the developer of Windward)

We use uGUI, the new Unity UI system. If you are interested into diving into that I know there will be a number of UI things that need to be done.

Let's start with the cloth physics on the sails and furling/unfurling of the sails, then we can go from there.

I will send you a private message with details on how we will share the project.

Cheers,

JS

 

[Thagarr]

@orfen, I have added you as a Provisional Programmer, so you should now have access to the Development Forum. Please let me know if you have any issues.

 

[orfen]

Alright, thanks guys.

 

[JohnSilver]

@orfen, I have laid out our various POC projects and realized we have a good opening for yourself on the Character Creation UI.

Previously, we had used UMA and 3rd party character creation tool to allow the player to customize their character. Since changing our character system to MCS we also need to redevelop that tool.

Would you be interested in leading that project?

Currently, there is no MCS tool for ingame character development or customization. When I spoke to MCS they were very interested in supporting this initiative and even suggested providing assistance if this asset was good enough to publish on the Unity store.

Since you are a professional develop I thought this may be of interest to you and perhaps you could donate this asset back to HoO? Of course, if you just want to colloborate with myself and/or others to just develop this for HoO, that also works.

Thoughts?

JS

 

[orfen]

Sure, i doubt that i could make something of the quality i would want in order to upload it to the asset store, but i can start developing for HoO and see how it goes from there.