Guidelines

        As a team, we wanted to make a fun to play game. We used various techniques to ensure this. One technique was using competitive analysis to see what was like it, and how we wanted to shape the game. Another technique we used was play testing often. We tried to playtest as much as we could, so that we could get feedback and make our game new player friendly.

System Designer

        Designing the player abilities was one of the more complex challenges of the project. They had to be reworked multiple times to accomplish the feel that the game needed. The goal was to create abilities that engaged the player in the combat. Another goal was to create abilities that the player would not just use and forget about them. These goals also stood true to our upgrades for the abilities. We wanted the abilities to change how the player played not just a pure DPS increase.

Programming

        Implementing code was large responsibility of mine. Once the team decided to focus on hero defense more than tower defense, my work began multiplying. I worked on implementing most the abilities the team planned out. 

        Menu / UI functionality is where I spent a second most amount of time working on. I created functionality then had the UI designer create the display for it.

        I often helped teammates with optimizing their code and creating modular code by utilizing various things that Unreal Engine 4 had to offer, like data structures, tables, and events.

Tools Programming

        To help improve the speed on completing tasks, I created some functions that did things that there were no nodes for in Unreal. An example of this is that the default UMG slider doesn't snap in any spots, so I created a function that allows the slider to snap based on a number of snaps.

Animator

        During the final months of the project, we collaborated with the art degree to get assets. Unfortunately, we didn't get an animator, so during that time with my normal duties, I added animation to one of the hats I was wearing. I learned everything I could as quickly as possible so that we could have functioning and decent animations. I had to learn quickly and efficiently.

Collaboration

        While implementing abilities, I worked with the designer that was implementing particles / general player facing info to design and add them to the abilities.

        Throughout the project, I worked with the UI designer to implement or improve UI functionality.

       Once new features and content were implemented, the team and I did many playtests with random people we found, and game design producers. We received feedback and made evaluations about our design based on all the feedback we received.

        Near the end of the project, the team worked with artists from the art degree. This allowed us to get custom made assets to implement into our project.

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