Capstone Project
April - July 2022
Bryan Huke, Jarrett Workman, Christopher Campbell, Coy Jones, Madisen Ingalls
Project overview
The capstone project is a large project at the end of Full Sail's program. Along with three other game designers, we were tasked with creating a game from scratch by taking inspiration from an existing game. My group chose Frogger 2 Swampy's Revenge as our reference game. Over the course of four month, we created core mechanics, movement systems, enemies, collectibles, levels, and more.
The project is currently being worked on but is expected to be "finished" by the end of the month. Whether or not the team continues working on the project after graduation is still up for debate.
Project Postmortem
After the project had concluded, the team got together to make a short postmortem video to highlight a few certain aspects of the project. Thanks to strict time restrictions set by our school, we were only able to focus on and debrief the most important challenges we had to deal with.
Personal Responsibilities
Highlighting my biggest contributions to the project
Movement System: The game's movement is built on top of a grid system. This meant we could not simply use the default movement component that Unreal Engine provides. Along with Jarrett, we created not one but two movement systems for this game. A quick prototype at the start of development allowed us to focus on other parts of the game, but eventually we redesigned everything from scratch. Coding a movement system challenged us to write efficient and readable code along with overcoming unexpected bugs and issues.
Input Retriggering: One of the pieces of code I am most proud of from this project is the input retriggering. This is a hidden system that helps prevent the player's inputs from being eaten. By storing and then checking for stored inputs, the system allows for fluid movement and is also optimized for performance.
Curse of the Temple Level: I designed this level around the idea of slow and careful movement. The level effectively flips the game's genre into a puzzle game for a short while. This level walks the fine line of challenging and frustrating. Playtesting and designing this level has helped me get familiar with iterative design and the importance of playtesting.
Energy Lab Level: The second level I designed for the project is a lot more tame. It mixes action and simple puzzles in a technology filled environment. I had a limited time period to design this level due to a massive over-scope and last minute change of plans. While the creation of the Energy Lab luckily was smooth and enjoyable, I learned a valuable lesson about over-scoping in the process.
Turn Based Monkey: This enemy was the most rewarding thing I worked on in this project. I learned A* pathfinding, coded it into an enemy, hooked up the enemy into the player's movement, and added some tools to make setting up the enemy easy all in the span of two days. I'm not only very happy with how the enemy turned out, but I am also extremely proud of myself and the process gave me a confidence boost.
Level Design
While I've never felt that level design is a strong suit of mine, I made two levels for the game from scratch. This includes the core mechanics of both levels along with a couple supporting mechanics. The two levels are called "Energy Lab" and "Curse of the Temple". These pictures were taken before the final visual overhaul pass.
Challenges and Key Takeaways
A small overview of what I learned from working on this project
Teamwork and project workflow:
This project was my first "real" experience working on a game as a team. Although I had worked in Unreal with teams before, past projects felt more like school assignments than anything else. Getting into the mental flow of designing and developing with other people was tricky, yet rewarding.
Confusing instructions:
A big challenge for not only myself but our whole team was a weird disconnect from our school. A lot of instructions and requirements over the course of the project were confusing, contradicting, and generally frustrating. As a team, we had to work together to decipher and please instructors and professors. While I'm hopeful the industry is more organized and structured, we definitely had good practice making the best out of our situations.
Scoping:
This project gave me a lot of experience when it came to scoping mechanics, features, levels, and my own productivity. While my solo projects are open ended and scope does not matter as much, this project was punishing when estimates were off in either direction. Over the months, I got better and better at estimating how long things would take to complete which in turn prevented issues from arising.
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Motivation:
I've always worried that a lack of motivation would mean that I couldn't force myself to get work done. That may have been true in the past, but I found it fairly easy to find motivation to work on the project, even if I was working on something I did not enjoy much. Strangely enough, realizing that has given me more motivation to learn game development.