City Below
Role:
Technical Designer
Date
March 2025- May 2025
Project Type
Collaborative Games Development
Team Size
28+ Collaborators
Genre
Third Person Shooter
Game Engine
Unreal Engine 5
Skills
Blueprinting, UI Data Linking, Documentation, Data Management, Teamwork, Optimisation
01 Concept
An action adventure Third person shooter where you take on the role of a bounty Hunter. I was a technical designer responsible for producing the ranged weapon systems and scoring system on a team of 28+ other students as part of my Junior Collaborative Games Development Module. The Project was aimed at producing a complete gameplay experience.
02 Contributions
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Initial Health system in collaboration with another member of the Technical Team
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Base Weapon System
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Ranged Weapon System
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Player Weapon
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Weapon Handler component - manages secondary weapon charges
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Interaction System
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Score System - Didn't Make the Final Build
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Upgrade System for pistol
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UI Data link for Hud - weapon ammo
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UI Data link for Results Panel
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TDD diagrams for Ranged weapon and Melee Weapon
03 Personal Focus and Outcomes
My Focus when putting myself forward as a technical designer was to refine my blueprinting skills and give myself the opportunity to experience the workload of a technical designer in a group environment. I Initially believed I would be in charge of a variety of systems, instead I was responsible for a select few important systems
Through this work I achieved a deeper understanding of blueprinting and how to best construct my systems, opting for more modular systems through the use of components and interfaces
Such as the Weapon Handler component, Score System and interaction system components. I deepened my understanding of interfaces to better manage the transfer of data between actors.
Ultimately I achieved my goal of developing key insights into the work of a technical designer and deepening my blueprinting skills. I learnt lessons about appropriately planning my systems before implementation such as the ranged weapon system which I initially built as a projectile based weapon, but eventually it became necessary to change into a trace based system. I also gained insight into the volatility of structs due to changes to the structures, and how to work around that using data tables.
04 Teamwork
This was my first large scale collaborative project and as such taught me valuable lessons about working within a team and what it takes to produce a successful outcome.
Overall I believed we worked well together, both in the tech team and the full group as a whole. Our Tech lead was effective at delegating tasks however at times there was not proper communication between the tech team and design team leading to disparities.
However despite our struggles we produced a polished and fun experience by the end of the development period. Buildin from our struggles and success I will be putting myself forward as technical lead in my final year collaborative project, in order to give myself some production and team management experience and use the lessons I learned in a constructive way.
05 Challenges
A major lesson this Project taught me is the importance of delegation and discussion to ensure each teammate is pulling their weight. One issue we faced during the project is a lack of communication between art, design and tech, with different members of the team having very different visions of how our game should look, which lead to confusion. This was largely due to not finalising designs before implementing leading to system rehauls and people confused about which version we were implementing
Another Challenge that arose was differing opinions on how something should be construct within the tech team. At one point I disagreed with the tech team about how a weapon trace should be implemented, with the tech lead advocating for the trace to begin at the camera (so that the bullet appears to go straight from where the player is looking to the hit location) and me advocating for the trace to originate from the weapon (to simulate a real weapon). we resolved this through measured conversation in order to achieve the best outcome
05 Moving forward
Ultimately this project deepened my understanding of blueprinting, the importance of modularity and actor communication, achieving my focus for the project.
It also taught me key lessons about how to operate within a team and how a team should run. Most prominent of which is the importance of appropriately delegating tasks to team members and having an open channel of communication between members of the team to avoid any misunderstandings and confusion
Moving forward I will be aiming to get some hands on experience leading a tech team during my Senior Collaborative Development project, and building on my prior knowledge.