August 2021 – July 2022
Descentium is a Rouge-like FPS game that was inspired by elements of Doom, Gunfire Reborn and Biding of Isaac
Canalside Studios
For my placement year I was able to secure employment at Canalside Studios, the university’s in house game studio. Along with 7 other students we created Descentium from the initial pitch to our supervisors to the final product and the experience it provided me has been invaluable.
Although I had worked in teams before, like in game jams or in other aspects of life, it was not like this. The team was made up of 2 programmers and 6 artists/designers, and as we had a flat management structure, when making decisions about the project, sometimes many opinions conflicted, so constructive group discussion was common to reach a decision the team was happy with and on rare occasions, such consensus eluded us and the decision was made by majority vote.
Working with people from other disciplines was also very helpful, as prior to this I had no idea of their workflow, but spending time with them I may not know everything but a basic understanding helped me with my communication across the disciplines.
Source Control: Perforce Helix Core
Learning to setup and use Perforce was instrumental in the team’s ability to work cooperatively on the project, helping to avoid duplication of effort and eliminating the need to spend time combining work together. Setting up was difficult, as working around the university’s network permissions was a constant obstacle but also improved my knowledge of networks
My Role
During this project, the team had several gaps in our skillset, and with a limited number of people, this resulted in people being forced to expand their knowledge and take on multiple roles within the team. For example along with my tasks on the game itself, I was in charge of our source control, file managment and backups.
The initial stages I was tasked with rapid prototyping of some the core aspects of the game and developed the prototypes for our 2 weapons and initial 3 enemy types to use in the very earliest of grey box testing. The weapons were expanded to have upgrades purchasable in the games in run shop so next working alongside our teams designer coming up with mechanics and prototypes or the more exotic upgrades. Next, I took the map generation system created by a team member and integrated it into the project as the development of it had been completed before we had merged into one project to put as the first upload onto our perforce server. Once integrated I added functionality for the upgrade system the player could acquire via going through both different types of portal and difficulty. Then again working with our designer created new mechanics for the players grenades with prototypes and then final mechanical versions just missing assets. Then upgrades for the grenades following the same process of prototypes into final mechanics.
Next my focus turned to the games 2 shops and linking their functionality into using the upgrade systems for the variety of abilities and weapons the player would haves access to during the game. This was my first chance to properly work with Unreal Engine 4 UI’s and was very valuable learn while prototyping the grey box UI for when it came to implementing the final UI. We then realised issues with our map generation system and myself and the other programmer quickly worked together to redesign and implement this new system then I made sure all the integrations were still working as intended and fixing any that were not. Then came time to work with one of the artists to design and implement the games many UI’s from main menu to the small UI for selecting the type of portal the player can choose. Which turned out to be much more time consuming than anticipated with multiple iterations and juice adding stages to make it feel good as in hindsight there were a lot of menu’s so making them not feel monotonous for the player to navigate.
Which then took us to near our aimed release date and the end of our time at Canalside Studios. Thus the remaining time was dedicated to polish and bug fixing. And while in hindsight there is potentially a lot which I may change now, without this experience I would not know that I should’ve done things differently and taking this knowledge forward (especially into my final year team project) will help future projects not hit the same issues I and the team encountered during the development of Descentium.