Today’s feature is all about Chris, Technical Support Specialist, who is a dab hand at Flow Graph, an experienced programmer, and just one of the members of the team helping out with your requests and queries about CRYENGINE every day. You may already know him from the forum, so read on to find out a little more about Chris, and discover his personal project which demonstrates what you can achieve with Flow Graph… Mr Bucket!

Hey Chris! Thanks for joining us. How did you end up joining Crytek?

I have been working for Crytek for just over eight months now. Previously, I was running a successful modded game server with over 20,000 accounts. That gave me a huge amount of satisfaction, because I created something that I could enjoy with a whole community. It made me realize what I wanted to do in life and where I wanted to be. I worked for Sony Xperia in technical support for a while and then applied for a position at Crytek!

What is your main focus at the moment?

Learning as much as I can every day in order to master CRYENGINE! The specific field I like to focus on is building game logic in Flow Graph, and also going deeper into Schematyc.

What does a regular day at work look like for you?

A big priority is handling tickets that come in through the CRYENGINE Launcher, contact[at]cryengine.com, and marketplace[at]cryengine.com. I look to analyze or solve each issue, or forward the issue to the relevant department if deeper investigation is required. I am also involved in testing and approving CRYENGINE Marketplace asset submissions. Direct contact with the community is something I enjoy and I believe is really important, so I find the time to pop over to the forum and CRYENGINE Answers, and I usually have the CRYENGINE Community Discord running too. I like to write scripts in order to speed up my work, and every now and then work on side projects such as Mr Bucket.

Mr Bucket? I think you need to tell us more!

Mr Bucket is a small platform game I’m working on which emerged from a personal investigation to find out just how powerful Flow Graph can be. I think it could be a useful demonstration for showing what you can achieve with Flow Graph. I started out by putting a character together just using Basic Entities. I linked them together and animated it via Flow Graph by rotating the joints.

Movement Flow Graph:

It went pretty well, so I decided to implement a range of character functions:

• Control of movement using an acceleration system built in Flow Graph
• Camera following & FOV calculated based on speed
• Jump physics using a deceleration system built in Flow Graph, using a ray cast to calculate the distance to the ground before every beam call
• Division of beam calls system to smooth the transition from point A to B
• Settings such as speed adjustments

And here are the results:

Ray cast log distance:

Part of the Flow Graph:

A global view:

It’s obviously a work in progress, so next I’m planning to implement enemies which can be defeated by jumping on them, and some special abilities, one of which will be... the bucket stomp! I’m also looking for ideas, so if you have any thoughts about the abilities Mr Bucket should have, let me know in the comments below. :)

What are you most looking forward to coming to the engine on the roadmap?

For me, it’s the Visual Editor for the Modular Behavior Tree and Schematyc 2.0.

Do you have any tips for people starting out with CRYENGINE?

If you’re starting out with CRYENGINE, watch our videos. They are great!

What are you playing at the moment?

At the moment I am playing Hunt Showdown, Counter Strike, and Realm Royale. Some of my favorite older games which really left an impression on me include Deus Ex, Tekken 3, Tony Hawk, Time Splitters: Future Perfect, Sniper Elite, all the way back to games like Super Mario and Raptor: Call of the Shadows.

Cheers Chris!

Want to work with CRYENGINE every day? We’re looking for new talent across all disciplines at Crytek, so check out our careers page. We love your feedback, and we’d also like to hear your ideas for Mr Bucket, so get involved in the comments, on the forums, and on our Facebook, and Twitter channels.

- Your CRYENGINE Team