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Springroll's Adventure
Project Duration: 4 Months
Publish Date: July 22nd, 2022
A Full Sail Capstone Project
An action platformer game based on the framework of the popular game "Frogger 2: Swampy's Revenge".
Contributors:
Game Designer: Bryan Huke
Game Designer: Christopher Campbell
Game Designer: Coy Jones
Game Designer: Madisen Ingalls
Project Overview
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The Capstone Project is a large project at the end of Full Sail's Game Design program. During this four month project, myself and the rest of Team Foxtrot worked together to create a game initially based around the mechanics of "Frogger 2: Swampy's Revenge" before eventually changing course to create our own game. As a team we created every part of this project from the ground up. Starting with essential mechanics, such as the player movement grid and the player movement systems, we created more content to our game as the four months passed. This finally concluded in a collaborate effort with our artist Madisen Ingalls to bring the game to the forefront of being a finished product.
Personal Responsibilities​
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Movement System/Movement Rework:
The Game's movement is built on top of a grid system. This meant that we couldn't simply use the default movement component that Unreal Engine provides. Along with Byran, we created two movement systems over the course of this project. A starting system at the very beginning of development allowed us to focus on other mechanics of the game, but eventually we redesigned everything from scratch to be more modular and easier to understand from a coding perspective. It was a challenging and rewarding experience to write efficient and readable code along with overcoming unexpected bugs and issues.
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Item Pickups:
An important ability of the player character that I designed, was the item pickup system. The player needed to be able to both walk into collectibles, as well as grab only certain ones from a distance. This included making sure that a player was not able to do both at the same time, and double up on their valuables. Grabbing items from a distance involved creating a sphere trace system that used both the player's position and orientation to determine if an item was in reach, as well as validating that the item should be grabbed before quickly pulling it toward them. There was a lot to learn about trace channels, physics, and code consolidation throughout this process.
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Slip Slide Away Level:
I designed this level around the idea of solving puzzles with the player character as the main puzzle piece! The level effectively gives the player the feeling of isolation as they must navigate a frozen tundra. This level is riddled with frozen pathways that temporarily remove the player's ability to control their character's movement as they slide across the ice. Playtesting and designing this level has helped me get familiar with puzzle design, bug testing, and the importance of double checking your variables.
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Deep Freeze Level:
This second level I designed was built around player resource management. Upon entering this level, the chill is cranked up to eleven, as the player now has to balance a warmth system with their attempt to progress through the level. This mixes elements in from Slip Slide Away as well, as the player must continue to puzzle solve and clear objectives to continue. This level was cut back in the very end of it to help with scope creep, however that didn't prevent a twist on the warmth mechanic from being created. Creating, playtesting, and adjusting this level helped me understand the importance of game balancing, keeping a level engaging, and twisting prior mechanics the player has already been exposed to.
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Art Asset Integration:
Towards the ends of this project, I was responsible for importing and reimporting art assets into the project and making sure everything functioned properly. This showed me the value of planning ahead with not only our blueprint design and coding, but with creating states that can be used to influence animation state machines. Throughout this I was also responsible in providing feedback on how meshes, textures, and animations looked to our artist Madisen Ingalls who did a fantastic job of keeping our team up to date and immediately creating new assets that we asked for.
Level Design​​
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Creating worlds for players to explore has been one of my biggest passions ever since I was first fascinated with worlds beyond my wildest dreams. For this project, I created two levels along with their core mechanics. The first of which was "Slip Slide Away" followed by "Deep Freeze". Both of these levels were designed around an ice aesthetic.
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These images were taken after development.
Challenges and Key Takeaways
A small overview of what I learned from working on this project
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Teamwork and project workflow:
This project was the third time I got to work with a team, but the first real experience creating a game from the ground up with one. We'd all previously worked with Unreal, in teams, before, but past projects were much smaller in scope and easier to throw together. This project took the collaboration of all of us to not only decide what we were going to make but decide what had the highest priorities and who was going to make those decisions come to light.
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Classroom Instruction:
A huge challenge that we all faced was the disconnect we had from our school. Not only were there several long periods where we received little feedback on our project, but there was often times where instructions would contradict themselves from not only class to class, but from one document to the next. This however strengthen our team as we worked together to make sense of the instructions and different parameters we were given until we came to a consensus on what was required of our team. While I expect the industry to be more organized and structured, our exposure to chaos has only made us stronger.
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Project Scope:
This project gave me the experience to recognize and measure scope when it came to creating mechanics, features, levels, and taking into account my own productivity. At the beginning, it was extremely difficult to measure how long any task would take, and by the end of it, I was often within minutes of my original estimates. This proved to be especially helpful in our last sprint as there were many things that needed to be tied up by the end of the project, and having proper estimates made sure I was always on task and never overtaken with the amount of work to be done.
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Productiveness and Life Balance:
This project was the true challenge for me through and through. Not only was I balancing a full time job during the day, but I have a family with a wife and kid. During this project I was able to maintain all of these aspects of my life, even dealing with a family crisis during the middle of it. This has proven to me that I have the ability to balance many different stressors of my life, and I look forward to any challenges that may arise in the future.
