Help Wanted: Additional Programmer for Dicey Dungeons

Terry Aug 23, 2018 0 Comments

Applications are now closed. Thank you!

Hello all! I’m looking for a programmer for a new videogame I’ve been working on, Dicey Dungeons. It’s a full or part time position for at least two months, and possibly longer. Ideally, you’d be available to start as soon as possible!

Dicey Dungeons is currently available in early alpha on itch.io, and it’s coming to Steam and Mobile in the next few months – i.e. we’re into the last few months of development. You can get the latest version here, or play some earlier free builds here. (Here’s a great youtube video of the most recent version!)

Dicey Dungeons is a three person project right now – a musician, and artist, and me, on design and programming. For the last six weeks, I’ve spent almost all of my time on programming work, and it’s meant design work has come to a halt. I think that’s been bad for the project, and I want to do something about it!

Dicey Dungeons is created with Haxe, using my own framework, which is an extension on top of OpenFL and HaxeStarling. I’m looking for someone who’s familiar with at least some of that!

• Experience with Haxe is a prerequisite.
• Experience with OpenFL and Starling would help a lot, but isn’t mandatory.
• Experience with Haxegon isn’t expected.

I’m basically looking for someone to tackle the more technically focused programming jobs, so that I can concentrate on the design focused ones. These jobs include:

• Optimisation: reduce draw calls, reduce cpu use, and skip unchanged frames where possible to reduce the system requirements of the game and make it run better across all devices.
• Create a system to automatically create 1080p assets from our 4K assets as needed, and restructure the code so that it can automatically handle different asset resolutions as an in-game setting.
• Expand the audio tech in the game to increase the range of cool things we can do – we’re really interested in exploring dynamic audio – particularly syncing sounds to music, using real-time filters like reverb, and layering tracks.
• Figure out a workflow for getting our After Effect animations working in starling fast and efficiently. Potential solutions range from building our own animation tech, to converting the animations to starling friendly file formats.
• Restructure and simplify the game’s “action” system so that we can implement a minimax AI for the enemies.
• Do the tech side of getting the game working well on mobile devices (which is mostly about reducing texture memory use – carefully unloading and reloading assets as needed). (I’ll be doing the design side – i.e. resolution independence, UI changes)
• Work towards making the game more moddable – this mostly means making it possible to load and unload different mods at runtime and creating a system to support that, refactoring existing systems in the game to make it easier for people to create radically different enemies, equipment and characters, and working with the existing modding community to add stuff they might want!
• Implement platform specific features like cloud saving and achievements for steam, iOS and google play. In particular, I’d really like to add Steam Workshop support.
• Help out with the more technically focused bugs on this public github issues list.

Payment stuff is negotiable! I can probably afford a rate of £25/hour GBP for two months, but I’m up for discussing more for less time depending on your qualifications and experience!

This job is for someone working remotely online – I’m based in London, but it doesn’t matter where you’re based.

If you’re interested, you can apply via this google form! Please fill it in by Monday the 3rd of September.

Thank you!