Summary

Expeditions: Rome is a Strategy RPG combining a similar combat system to that of XCOM, with classic RPG elements from that of Baldur's Gate. In 2023 it was nominated for and won the Danish Spileprisens Game of the Year.

I worked as a Gameplay Programmer on Expeditions: Rome, taking on multiple different tasks such as character abilities, camera controls, game events and UI.

I worked on Expeditions: Rome from very early in the project up until the game was close to release, I was then moved to start working on the next project. During development I worked closely with game designers and our UI artist to make the features match their intended vision as closely as possible.

One of the first features I got to implement by my self was our games paperdoll system. In the inventory screen we wanted a character visualising the gear they currently have equipped. The system already allowed for visually swapping the gear on our characters, so I created a new skeleton mesh and spawned it in the level under ground so it can't be seen. I then used a camera for capturing the character and rendered it to a 2D texture that is then displayed in the inventory.
One problem I encountered with my solution was that the Unreal camera was unable to capture the alpha channel if it also captures post-processing effects, resulting in either the character looking bad, or having a black square surrounding him. My solution to this problem was to use to different camera captures. One to use to capture the alpha channel and create a mask, and one to capture the character. I then combined these to get the final result.