AXEL VERA JIMENEZ
THE SIGNAL: STRANDED ON SIRENIS
APRIL - SEPTEMBER 2025| GOOSE BYTE
The Signal: Stranded on Sirenis is a single-player survival craft game set on a captivating alien planet that has ensnared you. Scavenge, build, extract, and survive your way through a complex world as you reveal the true intentions of this sentient planet - and why it has brought you here.
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I was a technical designer on this project and provided assistance in many areas of development including documentation, playtesting, and QA
Background
I initially started working at Goose Byte as part of my mandatory co-op period at Sheridan College, it was not only my first professional position in this industry, but also one of my first times working in Unreal Engine (my first time coding in C++!!!). Suffice to say there was a lot to learn if I wanted to keep up...
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Fast forward a few months and I had settled into the team's workflow, I was handed bigger and more crucial tasks every day and, once my internship ended, I was offered a full time contractor position at the company!
Representing Goose Byte @ XP Game Summit
PROGRAMMING
I had many different responsibilities as a programmer on this project, particularly when it came to items
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Item PICKUPS
As The Signal is a survival craft game, there's tons of different items, and item categories in it including:​
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Crafting materials (raw materials from the overworld, as well as crafted ones)
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Consumables (water and food sources, stat boosters, etc.)
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Guns
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Tools
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When I first came into the project each item pickup had to be manually created as a child blueprint of the parent 'Pickup' class, additionally there was subchildren of this class for each individual category of item. This method quickly cluttered the project files, required tedious manual labor, and presented issues when instantiating pickups at runtime. Fixing this pipeline was my first task on the project.
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After studying the code base for a bit, I figured out individual item data, regardless of category, was stored in a generic 'ItemDefinition' data asset which had all the info the pickups required; this meant I could simplify the pipeline by having a single 'Pickup' class in which you could slot in the appropriate data asset to get the item you wanted. What once required tedious ​
CLICK IMAGE FOR PDF!​​
This change in workflow opened up every existing item to be tested as a pickup effortlessly, and simplified every workflow which had anything to do with items.
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As an extra I decided to make a dev command which was able to spawn any given item in the game, which also accelerated testing significantly by allowing us to test specific items, crafting recipes without farming, and skip whole sections of the game by spawning key items!​​
Pictured: 2000 Iron spawned with dev command
PAGE UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Sorry for the inconvenience, but the page for this project is currently being worked on.
Plan: Showcase loot system, implementation of Unreal's GAS system and debug tools, playtesting and QA, documentation, etc.
Come back later.