InnerSpace

Studio	Role	Engine	Dates
PolyKnight Games	Director & Lead Engineer	Unity 3D	2016-2019

About Game

Official Website

InnerSpace launched on PS4, Xbox One, Switch, Windows, Mac, and Linux. For the majority of its development, I was its sole programmer. We ported the game to all platforms in-house.

It is an open-world exploration flying game where you unearth the secrets of inverted worlds by finding hidden relics and confronting each world’s Demigod.

InnerSpace is an exploration flying game set in the Inverse, a world of inside-out planets with no horizons. Soar through ancient skies and abandoned oceans to discover the lost history of this fading realm, where gods still wander.

My Role

• Lead Engineer
• Director

InnerSpace was a labor of love. Myself and five others founded PolyKnight Games as Seniors at UTD. We worked on InnerSpace for 3-years. Successfully running a Kickstarter, partnered with Aspyr for publishing and funding, ported the game to all consoles, and released the game. I was the sole engineer and director for the game, until we partnered with Aspyr when I hired additional help and lead the engineering team.

Responsibilities

Director	Lead Engineer
Project management Securing funding Partner relations Coordinating code, art, and design creative visions Hiring	Training New Engineers Gameplay Code Console Porting Optimization Editor Tooling

Some Stand-Out Feats

Inverted Planetary Physics

InnerSpace takes place in an inverted planet, inside-out! A flying game with fairly arbitrary physics, the character controller and world streaming could not use any off-the-shelf solutions. To accomplish this we created a custom coordinate and orientation system. This included editor tools for easily navigating the space.

This allowed us to quickly and efficiently generate local planetary orientation.

Cutscene System

Cinemachine didn't exist at the time of creation. So we had to create our own camera manager, cutscene coordinator, spline tracks, target tracking, camera sweep tools, and character controller auto-steering. It allowed us to author all of the cutscenes in-unity and to disregard orientation.

Console Ports

All ports were done in-house. PS4, XboxOne, Switch, Linux, Mac, and Windows. This is the first time I'd worked with the platforms and writing all the platform code while simultaneously developing the game's content was a lot to juggle.

Team Leadership

Juggling all the code and leading the team was a lot of work! I ran sprint-planning, milestone planning, communications with our publisher, and more! This is the project where I earned my chops as an engineer and as a technical producer.

Lessons Learned

• Managing multiple strong-personalities and creative visions
• Hiring processes
• Managing partner relationships
• Writing codebases that easily support multiple platforms
• Many, many, many gameplay programming lessons