Project Aera

Project Aera

Project Aera is a game/tech demo created in the Graphics Programming engine. It was made in 2012 for my Graphics Programming & Programming courses in Digital Arts & Entertainment.

The game is the beginning of an Animal Crossing meets Tamagotchi meets The Sims. You play as a little creature with some needs (hunger, energy...) that you have to fulfill. Ultimately, the village would be inhabited by other creatures and you would be able to communicate with them.


Graphics Programming Engine
The GP Engine is a C/C++ engine with the DirectX 10 framework we built during our Graphics Programming lessons, mentored by our teachers. Each week we added new components, including but not limited to:

• Model loading & rendering
• Shaders & Post-processing (HLSL)
• Animations
• Lighting
• Physics (NVIDIA PhysX)
• Triggers (Pickable items)
• Terrain & Skybox
• Debug rendering
• Sound/music (FMod)
• ...

Own implementations
In addition to what we did in class, I added a system to display 2D images and custom fonts for the UI, and implemented buttons (all from scratch). I also streamlined some already included functions, for example the model loading and inventory system.

This project was also a part of my programming course, so it also had some other requirements like const correctness, usage of design patterns and save and load functionality. The design patterns I included were Observer (for the buttons in the UI) and Factory (for the creation of pickable items, in this case oranges).

2D concept art of Fluffly, the main character

Everything in this demo was made by me (including the above concept art), except for the mushroom which was made by Dylan for our game Purify, the icons for hunger and energy which I found on Google, the font (HoboStd) and the music which is from Pokémon Heart Gold & Soul Silver.

Future
I have no intention continuing this project in its current state. It was a good C++ & graphics programming exercise, but I don't want to invest my time into expanding this engine since it is not my focus.
I really like the ideas I had in mind however, so I might take it up again as a Unity or Unreal project in the future. When this happens, you'll find the link right here!

Back to Coding Projects