Kuguard(Potae) Trarungruang
Game Engineer
Ghostology
By Team Vanaring
About
Ghostology is a thrilling 3D RPG Turn-based game. Assume the role of a budding Shaman student, honing your magical skills. Embark on a journey to become a master Shaman, Defending humanity against the malevolent forces of corrupted spirits.
Project Info
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Role: System/Tools Engineer, Prototype Engineer
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Team Size: 8
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Time frame: May 2023 - Present
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Engine: Unity 2022.3.3f1
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Repository: Github
Game Trailer
Introduction
This project is a carryover from class GAM400 in King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi in Thailand. After the class, The team decided to continue developing this project for publishing on stream. I had a chance to help implement many essential systems for the game.
System / Tools Engineer
Unlike other projects, in This project, I took the role of System/Tools Engineer instead of Gameplay Engineer. Since most of the team members are working in Thailand, I have to work remotely on the project while I'm in the USA. The difference in time zone made it difficult to cooperate with our faculty, so I made the System/Tools to support our team instead.
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Input system / UI navigation
I implemented an input system using the Unity package supporting both the keyboard and gamepad controller. Adding to the input system, I also created a stack class keeping track of previous buttons to help backtrack selected UI dynamically helping navigate through menu UI and scene perfectly in the game.
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Save/ Load Data System
For JRPG games, we need a proper Save/Load System to keep the player's progression further in the game. Since the game has many data to be stored differently, I made an interface class ISaveable capturing the data from multiple layers of class and variety into temporary storage between scenes and encrypted it into files. Not only store but I also need to restore the data from the file back into the game properly.
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Player Personal Data Class (Inventory)
Since I am in charge of the database and data within the game, I have an important role in designing the player's database class. I implemented the base manager class myself to work with a variety of Unity's scriptable objects(SO) that my friends create on top. The class can be expanded to generate run-time objects that work with the database.
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Lecture Subject Manager
Another database class I designed and made is a Lecture database class that is used to store lecture progression data and rewards in each course player assigned. This class is a bit less complicated than the previous one but consists of important content. Communicated to semester SO to load out the data we need into the manager.
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Personality trait
Another important status within this game is personality traits that give players bonuses depending on the activity the player partakes. Personality traits change dynamically so I have to be able to store progress data and current level. Help improve the game's school activity system.
Prototype Engineer
"If you gonna fail, fail faster." As we all know, spending time working on mechanics that might eventually be scrapped later is a waste of time. I also have another job working on prototyping game mechanics externally to make sure before putting effort into working on the mechanic.
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School Life System
The first prototyping mechanic I worked on was the school life system. I made the prototype based on the reference games. This prototype lets us see the problem early like complicated details and can decide to cut it off earlier. After testing, we decided to put this system into our game.
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Club Managing System
Another prototype I have been working on is a Club managing system that allows players to manage resources of both items and club members to work on collecting more resources and in-game currency to upgrade characters in combat. As a result, we decided to not put it in the game since it might make the game too complicated with more things to manage within the game.
Reward
In August 2023, we had a chance to submit our game prototype to contest in the game developer competition called "Depa Game Accelerator Program Thailand" with more than 20 participating teams. And we got the Best Art Direction with a reward of 15,000 THB (around 425 $)
The project also got the Best Game Talent of the Year 2024 award in Game Talent Showcase 3 Thailand in July 2024.
