Game Name: Collecathon Production Cycle: Fall 2018-Fall 2019
Collectathon is a third person platformer game, where players must collect objects inside of a world by sprinting into them. This project started as a mentorship to help myself better learn Unreal, continuing to develop it as I improved my knowledge of Unreal.
DESIGN:
The goal of the game is to break objects by sprinting into them, earning them a point. By doing this enough times, the player gains power ups, such as additional speed, or a boost jump, that allows them to break more blocks. Once they obtain even more points, they gain access to both powers at the same time, allowing them to break more blocks.
When I started designing the game, it started with creating a small prototype, with just the bare minimum of mechanics. After a few weeks, I would meet with my mentor to discuss what I had produced. From there, I would receive feedback on what I had created, then use to the next couple of weeks to iterate on that feedback, and add more to the game. This cycle continued for many weeks, until I was at the point where I showing this to more people. These people would give more feedback, and would help me hone the design further.
While creating this game, I documented much of the game’s development. I kept a journal of what I worked on each week, and made several videos of early playthroughs. Eventually, I upgraded to making full builds of the game, allowing folks to play them.
Download .zip build 02-06-19 (PC only)
Download .zip build 03-06-19 (PC only)
Download .rar build 05-21-19 (PC only)
SCRIPTING:
Collectathon was also where I continued to improve my skills at Unreal Blueprint. While I started with a basic third person controller, I routinely added more and more to the simple base in order to get what I needed. One of the first things I added was the sprinting mechanic. Originally, this mechanic was quite straightforward: When the player hit the sprint button, they would increase their run speed, depending on how many points they had, and set it back to normal when the sprint button was released. However, as the development progressed, this mechanic became more and more advanced.
Of course, I ran into problems while programming. One of the first issues I had was finding how to get the player to recognize when they had collided with a larger block. It took a few weeks to figure out how to get this to work correctly, but eventually I solved the issue. Other issues, only took a few days to solve, like the HUD, or the VFX. However, these things would rarely be finished, and would continue to be iterated on during the development.
Bugs were also somewhat prevalent in the making of Collectathon. While I was able to solve a majority of the bugs as they were introduced, some remained elusive for multiple months. One such was a bug where the sprinting VFX would remain on the player even when they weren’t sprinting. While this bug wasn’t game breaking, it was happening enough that I felt it necessary to fix after a certain point.