40 days - 20 members - Gameplay Programmer - Unreal Engine 4

Project Info

Project Summary

Made with Unreal Engine 4

The project was focused on the production stage of development as well as releasing the project.

This project had a concepting and pre-production phase which I was not a part of

This was the second team project involving cross-variation development and I worked on this at the end of my second academic year

Available Here

Team Composition

4 Programmers

10 Artists

6 Designers

Duration

1 Block - 8 weeks - 40 Project Days

10 May 2021 - 2 July 2021

Project Goals

The goal of this project was to create a first person stealth horror game based on the work that had already been done by Designers and Artists.

My Contributions

Role: Gameplay Programmer

Working on the Player character and hiding spots

I heavily reworked the functionality of the Player character created by the designers, as well as working on several hiding spots, some of which did not make it to the final product. Initially I was supposed to also work on one of the two AIs within the project, but after my work on the Player character this was scrapped

Player Character

For the Player character, a lot of the functionality was already in place when I started working on it, however, this functionality was functional at best. As I tried to make the functionality of the Player better, mainly the movement, I came across dozens of problems which were eventually too much to handle, and instead I started from scratch.

Doing so allowed me to give the player its proper movement like running and crouching in a much shorter span of time. My work on the player would also tie in with my other work on the hiding spots, which came with their own sets of challenges.

Hiding Spots

While initially intending to work on the second AI for the project when I was done with the Player character, this part was scrapped and so my efforts were relayed to working on the hiding spots. I worked on two forms of hiding spots, the table and the barrel and unfortunately only the latter made it into the final product.

The table, while a simple idea, proved to be a challenge as my experience with Unreal Engine 4 was still somewhat limited at the time, it had improved since the Luminous Tactics project, but there was still a lot to learn.

On multiple occasions I discovered a better way to handle things, causing me to rework part of the functionality, even worse was that several times my ideas had to be changed because the engine did not allow me to do it that way. With my current level of experience, I think I would have been able to make it work in a quarter of the time I had spent on it.

The barrel on the other hand was much simpler, there I was able to easily implement my ideas and despite some slight oversights on my part did not require many reworks, the only notable one was the Player having to be responsible for detecting the Barrel instead of the other way around, this also tied into my work on the Player once again.

Davey Vermeeren