About Me.

I am Daniel He, a Gameplay Programmer Graduating from SMU Guildhall and looking for a job. I am interested in enemy AI, game physics, and everything directly connected to the gameplay, and the design of game mechanics itself. As a programmer, I aim to use the most simple and elegant code to create the most deep and intricate gameplay experience.

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A Short Story About Me:

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When I was working in HardDriverZ, my second group project at guildhall, I was working on pick ups and status effects. There is a shield pickup that can block other people’s items and prevent you from getting hindered by environmental traps. And there was a really funny bug that I encountered: after we added the functionality to make players respawn when they fall off the track, sometimes they would be immediately shot into the air and fall again. With some more thorough tests we found out it happens when the player has a shield on. 

 

I was very confused because not a single piece of code I wrote can add force or mess with the physics, after I checked the respawn function, I finally found out the reason. There is a function on the kart called StunKart that we use when the kart hit a trap which set kart’s physics speed to zero and blocks user input for a while. The shield prevents player from getting stunned, but the kill zone in our game also stuns the player after teleporting them back on track, this makes the player with a shield getting teleported back on the track while maintaining their freefall speed, which cause them to immediately collide with the track and bounce off again. 

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Sometimes when debugging you really need to think outside of the box.