Souls of Steel is a 2 player cooperative stealth game set in Mariupol Ukraine. It is meant to let the player experience what it is like to live in Ukraine during the war.
It is about a boy who joins the army and tries to help the other citizens in Mariupol which is under siege and needs the assistance of a drone to navigate the dangers.
As part of a study project we were supposed to work on one game for 9 weeks and I was approached by a Ukranian friend of mine.
I was honored to have been asked for this project, and with a full team of 12 people we worked on 2 games for 9 weeks: Souls of Steel and Bound by Bonds.
I mainly had the job of making the interactions between the two players, one of which controlled a drone and the other a human soldier. I was responsible for the two players connecting together using the internet, making sure everything was synched and the game worked differently based on the chosen role.
I made the drone powers, it has a minimap capable of seeing their own and player positions, it also showed the objectives and coming airstrikes. It also could see mines that were less visible to the soldier
Next to this I was also responsible for patrolling enemies that would try to find and shoot the soldier player. So I made a system to specify a specific path for an enemy soldier to patrol and a system that would let the designers specify the enemy shooting behavior. When a soldier sees or hears the human player it would try to get as close as possible to the last known location and try to shoot them if visible according to that behavior.
This project was an amazing experience because I had never worked on a project with this scope before, it felt great to work on a project so dear to my friends and teammates' hearts. And I think we made something really amazing.