Bradley Jones - Wakeboard Wayne

Wakeboard Wayne is a mobile endless runner released on the Google Play Store. You move Wayne across water to hit ramp tricks, dodge buoys, and collect coins. It was my first self-directed solo project taken all the way to a public release. I hired artists and a composer for around £100, managed the budget, and shipped it.

In 2023 I began rebuilding the game in 3D with tighter lane-based movement and a new control scheme. Development is currently on hold while I focus on university and Crashbound, but the systems I built for it are documented below.

The original version spawned obstacles at random positions between two points. Rebuilding around three fixed lanes required a new approach — obstacles come in single, double, and triple lane varieties, and the spawner needs to verify that the relevant lanes are clear before placing anything. Each lane tracks occupancy using a trigger collider on every obstacle group; when an obstacle is passing through a lane's spawn position, that lane's spawnDisabled flag is set to true. If a suitable lane can't be found, the method schedules itself to retry sooner rather than leaving the path empty. Spawn weights for each obstacle are stored in a spreadsheet and summed at runtime to calculate each item's probability, making it easy to tweak the difficulty curve without touching code.

For touch controls I wrote a gesture recogniser that distinguishes between swipes, taps, and double taps. When a touch begins, the screen position is recorded. When it ends, the displacement is compared against a threshold, if it exceeds the threshold, the dominant axis of the vector determines the swipe direction. Each direction fires its own Unity event, keeping the input system decoupled from the actions it triggers. If the displacement is below the threshold it's treated as a tap; a short timer then checks for a second tap to identify a double tap. Both tap events also fire via Unity events.