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Drone Prototype

ExplosiveDroneIcon.png
Highlights

  • Quick prototyping

  • Use case analisys

  • Interaction with stakeholders

Context

A customer asked to adapt the existing drones in our game to a new use case.

The new use case was made of two parts:

1) A kamikaze version of the drone, able to explode on impact with a target or a surface.

2) The capability to drop explosives from a drone.

The first goal was to come up with a basic prototype able to satisfy the essentials of the use case to appeal the customer and give them a glance of the possible final result.

Workflow

The prototype was completed in one work day.

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In the morning I interacted with the senior designer in my team to agree on some aspect of the deliverable, according to the discussions had with stakeholders in the previous days.

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Then I started prototyping the kamikaze drone since it was the easiest. Using in-editor SQF scripting, I attached an explosive to a drone and triggered its detonation with an event handler on impact.

After that, I jumped on the "dropping bombs" part, creating a function able to spawn an explosive at a given position.

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I checked with the senior designer in my team that the result was the one expected.​

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DroneKamikazeVideoThumbnail.png

Coming soon!

DroneDroppingBombsVideoThumbnail.png

Coming soon!

The second step was to make the prototype's code a bit more modular, expandable, and easy to play with, removing hard-coded parts and making it easier to change objects and tweak variables. For example, I made it possible to trigger the function responsible for dropping bobs to be triggered with a keybinding instead of calling it directly from the editor console.

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​In the late afternoon, the prototype was ready and I did the final touches according to the senior designer's latest feedback.

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I then recorded a video, prepared a quick presentation, and reached out to the stakeholder assigned to this topic to present him with the results. The video was great for displaying the results quickly and effectively also to the customer.

The prototype was welcomed with enthusiasm and a project was born from it. The kamikaze drone and the drone dropping bombs later became two new features in VBS4.

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