Homestead Arcana is a third-person adventure game built with the Unity Engine. I worked on the project from March 2021 to May 2023, primarily as a Gameplay, UI, and Tools Programmer.

My primary contributions to the project include:

Engineering ownership of several core systems and their respective user interfaces

• Crafting Stations and Crafting Menu

• Porter Shop

• Inventory Grid and Inventory Management

Engineering ownership of several side content systems

• Broom racing

• Miasma stashes

• Character Customization

• Fast Travel

• Storage Chests

Implementation of several pause menu screens

• Recipes

• Inventory

• Map

• Options

Other miscellaneous engineering contributions

• Huckleberry Conversation Marker and Camp Behavior

• Plant Tending Upgrades

Crafting

Crafting in Homestead Arcana is one of the game’s core systems. After being assigned to the system from a basic proof-of-concept, I worked alongside another engineer to finish its development and iterate on it. The other engineer took ownership of further developing the backend Recipe and Crafting pipeline, and I took ownership of completing the creation of the Crafting Stations and Crafting Menu.

Crafting Menu

My most significant contribution to the Crafting System was the development of the Crafting menu.

Crafting Stations

Homestead has several crafting stations, including a Cauldrun, Grill, Windmill, Workbench, and Composter. They all feature upgrades that the player can craft from the respective lower-tier version of a station. These upgrades add buffs to the stations and can also be required for specific recipes.

crafting saving

I also contributed to the core backend crafting system by ensuring it could save and load its state. Homestead features a custom-saving solution built by another engineer, and I was tasked with linking the Crafting system to it. This was an excellent exercise in creating a saveable system, especially a somewhat complex one requiring several aspects to be persisted on load.

Crafting stations all have their own inventories of crafted items, and if something is actively crafting, I need to make sure the station reinitializes itself into a crafting state with the correct recipe being crafted and knowing how much time is left on that craft.

Porter Shop

The Porter is an in-game character who visits the player’s camp daily. While the Porter is present, the player can interact with them to access the Porter Shop Menu. This shop allows players to sell valuable items and buy essential upgrade items or recipes. The addition of the Porter Shop came towards the end of production, and I was tasked with building out the Shop system and the UI Menu to facilitate it. I worked very closely with a paired designer to build this system, and due to its late inclusion into the game, we had to prototype and iterate rapidly since the Shop would greatly affect the economy and progression balance of the game.

Inventory Management

Inventory Management is a core part of Homestead Arcana. After joining the project early in development, I took primary ownership of the UI programming for the game’s Inventory system and implemented new behaviors for the Inventory Grid.

My primary contributions included:

• Adding item sorting

• Visual item filtering

• Cross-inventory drag-and-drop

• Controller support

Broom Races

Contributions:

• Fully owned from initial concept to full technical implementation

• Worked very closely with a paired designer to determine the needs of the system and aid in content creation

  • Assisted in the creation of 50% of the races (8 races)

• Developed tools to aid in the creation of races

System Summary:

• Once unlocking the Broom, Huckleberry will guide the player to any of the nearest race bells found at the player’s main homestead or base camps.

• Each race bell has its own location-specific collection of races for the player.

• The player must complete races to unlock the full location collection.

• Once races are completed the player is given a reward.

Miasma Stashes

Contributions:

• Fully owned from initial concept to full technical implementation

System Summary:

• Miasma stashes are a collection of randomly spawning chests that the player can find while exploring the Miasma.

• Each time the player enters the Miasma a random amount of stashes is activated and populated with random items.

• Each stash is assigned a loot pool that it can pick items from with a variety of rarities and drop chances.

Storage Containers

Contributions:

• Fully owned from initial concept to full technical implementation

• Worked closely with design to implement system and UI design docs and perform iterations.

System Summary:

• Storage Containers are a way for the player to take items from their inventory and store them for an indefinite amount of time.

• Standard Storage Chests simply hold items and cannot communicate with any other systems.

• Upgraded Magic Storage Chests have a larger capacity and are able to be accessed from the Crafting UI for either ingredient collection or putting crafted items directly into storage.

Character Creation & Wardrobe Customization

Contributions:

• Took existing back-end functionality for changing active character model pieces and developed the full system surrounding it.

• Worked closely with design to implement system and UI design docs and perform iterations.

• Created both new game Character Creation screens as well as Wardrobe Customization

• Created functionality for unlocking new customization pieces and crafting clothing recipes.

• Ensured Customization options save and loaded properly

System Summary:

• When starting a new game the player is able to customization the appearance of their character.

• These options range from hair color, eye color, hairstyle, and gender presentation.

• Once in-game, the player eventually will be given a Wardrobe which allows them to customize the clothing options their character is wearing. These options include Hats, Hair, Outfits, and Shoes.

Pause Menu Pages

Contributions:

• Finished the creation of the main player inventory page including adding stat, currency, and name info.

• Created several pause menu subpages

  • Map UI

    • Displays the current location of the player on the map, the location of Miasma scars, and the location of the fast travel positions.

    • Respond to player game progress by showing areas of the map still affected by the Miasma.

  • Options page

    • Implemented the UI for the pause menu Options page as well as much of the options functionality.

  • Recipes page

    • Implemented the Recipes tab that is used to display the recipes the player currently knows

Misc Gameplay and UI Contributions

During development, I also assisted in feature additions, refactors, and bug fixes for several other systems and gameplay elements that weren’t necessarily owned by me.

These include:

• Huckleberry homestead behavior and Conversation POI

  • To assist in the development of AI in the game I took charge of several aspects of the development of Huckleberry’s behavior.

  • Added to Huckleberry’s state-machine behavior for the homestead to have him react to the player tending plants or placing crafting stations.

  • Added conversation POIs as a way for narrative design to have Huckleberry lead the player to certain locations for dialogue.

• Plant Tending Upgrades

  • Added to the existing plant system a way for the player to upgrade the tools they use while tending. Each tool upgrade has a different effect ranging from a growth modifier buff to a chance to not consume compost when applied to plants.