Rebound
Article last updated: March 9, 2023
I worked on a university game project called rebound during the span of a semester together with 5 other project members. The game was called Rebound and would be built using Unreal Engine 4 with the Chaos destruction system.
While it unfortunately did not meet our expectations when starting, it was an incredibly valuable learning experience from a technical and organizational standpoint.
Originally, my responsibilities were meant to be more supervisional, but due to setbacks experienced by my other group project members, it devolved into a role of addressing problems that other group members were not able to address.
This was a general overview of my tasks:
- Managing the git respository.
- Working on the chaos destruction system.
- Working on the weapon system.
- Working on the combo system.
- Working on the drug powerup system.
- Identifying bugs and perfomance issues.
- Assisting with integrating new assests into the project.
- Assisting others with engine related issues ranging from UI integration, .
- Upgrading the engine version from 4.27 to 5.0.2 when it became available
- Prototyping a level editor.
- Building game versions.
Most of these systems were either partially or completely written from scratch while accomodating for flexibility. Parts of the game were made in C++ by myself. These choices were poor in retrospect, as they took up a lot of development time.
These choices and the overall projects' shortcomings were caused in part due to the overall lack of planning. I was aware of this and meant to play a much larger role in planning.
I set up a Kanban Board using Jira and planned to have weekly meetings to have a better overall overview of the progress that was being made. I also pleaded for more time to configure our workflow better. This was to better address any technical issues we could have from using Unreal Engine, which most other project member had no prior experience developing for.
This task was taken over as I needed more time to take over tasks from other project members as well as to keep up with my other courses.
Nevertheless, I found this project to be a valuable lesson on working with Unreal Engine and the importance of a well-managed project, especially when lacking certain quality-of-life tools to make development a smoother process.
The development timeline of my group and myself on the game can be found here. The folders are sorted by the type of work and the month they were done in.
[Update: 9-3-2023]