Carles Homs - Game Designer & Gameplay Programmer

“10 milliseconds can make all the difference.”
Hi, I’m Carles, and I was game designer and gameplay programmer at Broken Gem for 4 months.

I have a burning passion for games, both to make players the protagonists of their own stories and give them the freedom to make meaningful choices, learn from them, and formulate strategies. On the other hand, I love to code, to build intricate systems and see the gears start turning as I create a logical machine that achieves the desired goal in the most elegant and optimal way. I took this two concepts that fascinate me and decided to pursue them thoroughly.

I mostly worked on the player characters. As a game designer, I helped to make the GDD and take the initial design choices for the game, especially the character’s possible actions, combat abilities, characteristics, items, etc. As a gameplay programmer, I had to implement each of the designed features for the characters with Lua scripting and iterate them to see if they achieved the desired design results we wanted, and either fix, improve, or discard them.

Additionally, I developed the character’s score system and scene, and spent a great amount of time working as QA for the programmers, reporting engine bugs and requesting new tools and features.

PROJECT CONTRIBUTION

• Character Progression Design: I made the first design and code iterations of a progression system involving stats, skill trees, consumables, and equipment. Sadly, some of these features were cut, but others evolved into the potions and score systems.
• Character Gameplay Design: I focused mostly on the character design in the aspects of gameplay: what can they do, how to they control, and what gives them a unique playstyle.
• Character Gameplay Implementation: I scripted everything that the players can do including implementations related to animations, particles, audio, and some character-camera interactions.
• Character Polish and QA: I tried to go the extra mile to make character gameplay satisfying and responsive, iterating it over and over until everything felt exactly as we wanted, like action timing, action feedback, and responsive controls.
• Score System and Scene: I designed and crafted the level end score scene and the score system for the characters where they compete against each other in regards to their gameplay performance, which includes combat, exploration, and cooperation.
• Broken Engine QA: I spent a significant amount of time working as an engine QA, reporting bugs and requesting potentially useful features amounting up to 74 Issues, almost half of all reports made.