Death Bloom: Arveado's Final Chapter

At the University of Texas at Dallas' Game Lab course, I worked as a Blueprints Programmer over the Spring 2023 semester to create necessary mechanics for the game to function.

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Essentially, I was in charge of implementing mechanics that designers asked of us, among others. Some of these mechanics included a state system for the lantern the player holds throughout the game, a squeeze mechanic that put players on a spline and slowly moved them between two tight walls, and various miscellaneous additions to events that were programmed within level blueprints.

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The biggest challenge with a game like this was that virtually nobody had used Blueprints in our team up to this point, even the most experienced of us. Coming from a Design background with some programming experience in C# and Python, I was excited to try something more visual. Likely, the most difficult part for me, and others, was finding ways to organize ourselves and our work, since working visually was much less efficient than we would have hoped starting out, and eventually we saw our blueprints become messes. 

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Eventually, we found a system that worked for us, using Github and GitKraken for version control, and using a custom check-out system to make sure only one of us edited a system at a time, so as to prevent merge conflicts. Our more experienced programmers took some time to organize the scripts better, and we realized, collectively, the power of Blueprint functions and events. 

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As the semester went on and I talked with Designers to implement necessary mechanics, trying to help make their visions reality, I found power in creating tools for mechanic customization, such as with the squeeze mechanic that could be edited in any way, from the shape of the spline, to the angle of entry. I would go on to talk to Artists about the lantern alongside Designers, trying to make it have a dynamic swing, though this would later be cut out when hands were introduced.

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Nearing the end of development, I took part in overall polish, tweaking bits and pieces of code to fix bugs and visual glitches, and in UI, animating the main reticle using event systems and sprite arrays, as well as polishing up the end credits.

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Overall, this was an exciting and challenging experience. I learned a lot about Unreal Engine and its underlying systems, and am pretty comfortable experimenting on my own. Currently I am using that experience on a personal project where fish attack other fish in mech suits. Keep an eye out for that!

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And if you've made it this far, thank you so much for reading. I hope you found it worthwhile.

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