Project 3
Specialist Application

From the 2nd of December to 13th of February, I’ll work in a group based on my specialism to create a game. We’ll start by exploring three scenarios (Escape Artist, Tunnel of Terror, The Final Decree), generating ideas with mind maps, and setting personal and team goals. We’ll use Trello to track tasks and progress each week.

I’ll research similar games and tutorials to inform my work and contribute to our Game Design Document (GDD). In my assigned role—programmer—I’ll complete tasks, plan assets, and manage risks while documenting my progress in weekly reflections and meeting notes.

I’ll help produce, test, and finalize the game with my team, updating our Trello board and reflections weekly. At the end, we’ll upload the game and complete an evaluation, reflecting on my own progress, contributions, and teamwork. I’ll be assessed on my own work and collaboration, not my peers’ performance.

Client Briefs

Brief 1

Escape Artist

Brief 2

Tunnel of Terror

Brief 3

The Final Decree

Task 1
Generating Initial Ideas

Developing a Mind Map

This mindmap (fig. 1) showcases our team's expansion of our chosen idea (based on the first brief) in the form of an asset list, with each person making sure that they're aware of what they need to produce for the project to be complete.

Figure 1: Our team's mindmap being used as an asset list.

Rationalisation & Personal Goals

Our team decided to choose this scenario because we think it would best align with the idea we had come up with before seeing the briefs. A major advantage of this idea is that, due to it's comparability to our pre-existing idea, it would be easy to come up with features that fit into our theme and make for an enjoyable experience. One challenge we may face is feature creep due to our confidence as a team, which could lead to creep due to our relative lack of experience. This idea is mainly influenced by games such as Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare and The Forest.

One skill I want to develop during this project is my familiarity with Unreal Engine, including the use of Blueprints and Behaviour Trees. Working on this concept gives me the opportunity to practice how enemies work inside of Unreal Engine, alongside helping me realise how versatile the engine is as a whole.

Task 2
Selecting a Specialism

Market Research

Through researching Red Dead Redemption’s Undead Nightmare DLC, I discovered some new systems that I could consider implementing alongside the zombies in our game.

One of these being a fire spreading system that would allow the players to control the threat of the zombie hordes effectively without much stress, a “bait” item that could lure zombies towards a target location, enabling the player to think of new, creative ways to control the zombies in a less direct manner to the aforementioned fire in order to complete objectives, as well as possibly being able to lead the zombies away from groups of civilians that the player could want to rescue.

Alongside this, seeing the range of weaponry available shed some light on the misconceptions we may have had regarding the historical accuracy of our game, including weapons such as the blunderbuss or the tomahawk, which none of us had thought of initially due to the stereotypical societal perception of what a “Wild West”esque game should be like, with cowboys on horses that only carry revolvers, repeaters and lassos when it comes to what limited tools they would use, not forgetting the machetes and knives that could also be included if you were to discuss the melee capabilities of these stereotypes.

Tutorial Research

This tutorial is about creating an Unreal Engine save system, which I decided to implement into our game to minimise player frustration when failing. A save system means that the player wouldn't need to reset the entire game upon failure. This tutorial helped me expand my knowledge of Unreal Engine's innate Save Slot system, which helps progress my personal goal of learning more functions of the engine.

This tutorial helped me automate the aforementioned save system, allowing players to progress further into the game without having to worry about manual saving. By showing different variable types (some of which I hadn't interacted with before), this tutorial helps me see more functions of Unreal Engine, further progressing my personal goal.

This tutorial enabled me to create a system that allows the player to swap between weapons, as our project was intended to contain a variety of both ranged and melee weapons. This helps with my personal goal as I had never tried a system that attaches objects to the player, aswell as the Unreal Engine skeletal animation system.

Task 3
Constructing a Game Design Document

Completed GDD

In the GGD, I worked partially on Part 1 (which is a general overview of the project as a whole, meaning we all contributed to it) and Part 3, which is the part dedicated to the team's programmer (me), detailing things I had to consider in regards to technical functionality and making my team's creative work come to life.

Task 4
Game Production & Testing

Reflecitve Journal & Weekly Tracking Here

Task 5
Evaluation

Final Product

Individual/Group Product

Evaluation

Personal Progress

I believe that throughout this project, I have managed to improve my skills with Unreal Engine since I was able to learn a variety of things that I hadn't known before, such as how to make a system to equip different weapons, as well as exploration of the UI/widget system, behaviour trees and navigation mapping, to name a few. Learning these has been beneficial as I came across new issues and therefore had to adapt to fix them, giving me a greater insight to how the engine performs and its helpful features that identify errors before playing the game, such as the Output Log and Compile system, which pair to show you exactly which block of code is in need of repairs. A large problem that I faced was wasting time through the attempt to create a save/load system, which took too much time for a comparably slim benefit as we decided that the game, being a demo, didn't need such a system. Thankfully, this was towards the beginning of the project so I was able to pivot fairly early and focus on more important mechanics, such as the ability to actually kill enemies through shooting or the range of pickaxes or the enemy being able to chase the player. Using Trello as a time plan was initially quite a good idea, for the first 3 or so weeks of the project. However, after these 3 weeks, I had filled out all the tasks set out on the site, and hadn't added any tasks that were currently relevant. Feedback helped me improve my personal project as I was able to know whether or not what I was adding to the game was currently relevant or not, as well as what has priority in when to be implemented. If I were given the opportunity to redo this project, I would probably ensure that I implemented more important features first, rather than spending time on features that were less impactful to the player's experience.

Project 3 Specialist Application