Temple of Giants was the final project of my second year at Breda University of Applied Sciences. The project was made entirely within Unreal Engine 4.
Description
The final project in my second year at BUas. I was tasked with creating the gameplay systems for the puzzle elements. This mainly involved creating dynamic interfaces for designers and artists so that they could link objects in the world together by chaining gate logic. This allowed for complex puzzles and triggers in the levels. Besides that I did some all-round bug fixing and gameplay logic for objects like swinging blades and gates.
The Team
For this game we had quite a large team in the middle of the first Covid lockdown in The Netherlands. This posed some challenges, but we made it work. The programming team consisted out of five programmers. We made use of scrum and bug tracking forms to communicate with the design and art team. I think we had a fairly well streamlined pipeline in terms of content creation and bug fixing.
Challenges
Since the project was entirely within Unreal Engine 4, there was no real challenges in terms of technical systems. It was more a matter of consistently pumping out content. Sometimes the engine works against you, but we made it work.
User Feedback
This project revolved a lot around quality control. Early on we discussed and set up tools to gather this user feedback. By communicating with the design team, changes were implemented based on this feedback. The project can be found on our Itch.io page.
Lessons Learned
The main lessons learned from this project were about working in bigger teams, and communicating between different disciplines. Working from home during a pandemic was also a challenge. User feedback has to be gathered early on and clearly communicated within the team to fix problems before it's too late. Unreal Engine is definitely not my favorite tool to work with. I prefer some more technical depth.