Artifact Name: Virus Game (Unreal Engine)
Artifact Description: This artifact was a group project where a group of four were tasked with picking a game from a list of choices and working together to create it. My group chose to create a Virus Game, a first person shooter where the objective is for the player to kill all of the viruses before they a) Die, or b) the viruses replicate out of control.
Tool(s) Used: Unreal Engine 4, Sourcetree, Bitbucket
Highlighted Skills: Programming Knowledge with Blueprints in Unreal Engine 4
Reflection
How would I describe the process of creating and polishing this artifact?
Tedious. When this project was assigned, there was no assigned "Leader" for any of the groups. As not everybody in a school environment is "eager" to get work done, this put us in a precarious situation where nobody was speaking up. I chose to take the lead on this project, scheduled weekly meetings, divide work load and collaborate through Bitbucket to have a repository available to each team members as well as create a form of "paper trail" for all of our version iterations.
Although there were two gameplay programmers (myself and another student), the other student proved to not be reliable enough so I took on the work load myself. I created all of the functionality seen in the attached video. This includes AI logic, player functionality, powerup and pickup functionality, teleporter and jump pad logic, opening/closing doors, win/loss conditions, the menu and all of the different branches in the repository for version control.
We had a team member for 3D models and another member for 3D level design. While the 3D artist did all of the virus models (seen in the pictures and attached video), the level designer did a rough, texture-less pass of a level and I ended up taking over to get everything cleaned up, textured and path-able for the AI.
What did I learn as I was creating it and improving it?
I didn't learn a whole lot. By the time I got to this project, I'd understood game design on a fundamental level. At least enough to consider myself intermediate in the field, without professional experience. There were no tutorials, additional reading or extra-curricular activities that contributed to my development of this project. I looked at this project more as a challenge for myself up to that point in my education. Could I create a passable video game prototype? You tell me.
What challenges did I face?
The biggest challenges came in managing a team of students and getting everyone to work together and meet a deadline each week. As I stated, some students aren't completely interested in doing the work if they can just squeak by and still graduate and unfortunately I ended up with some students like that. With an 8 week maximum deadline, I couldn't wait for my partners to get their end of the work done so I would jump in, make my own branch so as not to accidentally overwrite any work they might have done in the meantime, and then merge each branch during our meetings.
How did I incorporate feedback as I made changes to the artifact?
I incorporated feedback for this project by constantly iterating. Each week that went by saw a substantial increase in quality of the project (although it isn't a marketable product by any means, of course). The instructor clearly played our game each week and gave feedback on bugs, missing features or ideas to incorporate and I took it all equally seriously. This project marked the first time where I almost couldn't contain my excitement when it came to developing a video game project.
How was the artifact improved?
For this project, I realized there were missing pieces for a player in a real video game scenario that would elevate it further. The most prominent being sound effects and a win/loss condition. The original artifact served almost a simulation as there was no real objective and no real way to win or lose. When I set out to improve on this project, I ripped sounds from a video game called 'Star Wars Jedi Knight 3: Jedi Academy' to add Quake-like sound effects to things like reloading, grabbing power-ups/pickups and player damage events. These things can all be seen/heard in the attached video file.
