Genre: Platformer

Engine: Unreal Engine

Role: Lead Programmer & Project Manager

Team size: 5

Development time: 4 months

Link: https://zyhu.itch.io/gumates

About the game

Game Trailer

Gumates is a 2 player couch co-op game where you and your friend play as two gummy bears stuck together. You’ll have to move around together, pull one another and coordinate you movements to get across the various levels.

My Role: Lead Programmer & Project Manager

Proejct manager

As Project Manager, I was responsible for maintaining a clear roadmap throughout the entire development cycle. I assigned tasks according to priorities and dependencies, ensuring deadlines were realistic and achievable based on each team member’s performance and availability.

We used Jira as our primary project management platform and held weekly sprints to keep the team aligned and on track.

Lead Programmer

I also coordinated other programmers to follow coherent standards and assigned tasks based on weekly goals and skill levels as well as implementing most gameplay features such as grabbable objects, physics behaviours and more.

Physics

One of the main challenges in this project was the physical nature of the game. We wanted the physics interactions to drive the gameplay while still maintaining satisfying controls for platforming and hand movements.

This required most animations to blend between ragdoll behaviors and handcrafted animations, while ensuring these forces wouldn’t interfere with the physics simulation or collisions.

We ended up working with two separate physics layers: one dedicated solely to animation interactions, which didn’t apply forces to move objects, and another for actual physics-based movements. This approach allowed us to maintain precise control over collisions and interactions while giving player models the ability to stretch and bend, adding visual flair.

Extra footage