Description

This game was produced as part of a university run module called Technical Games Production, we were put into groups of 5 and instructed to create a game within 3 months to then later present to Ubisoft Leamington. Overall the project was a success, the game got two full levels with enemies and the presentation went well.

Broken chain is a 3D platforming game with a focus on environmentally collected powerups to beat platforming challenges in your own unique way. The game takes place in the main characters mind, in the story your chain is what links you to reality and your chain got severed. You go throughout the levels to find chain links and reconnect your chain back to reality. This gave us the freedom to come up with whatever level design we wanted as we didn't need to have it make much sense.

I was designated to lead the team early on as I was the most experienced with project management and source control, I was in charge of all the project management documents as well as programming the main character as it's one of the most important parts of a platformer game. Below is a list of the other team members and their roles:

What I learnt.

This project was a great experience as it taught me how to work in teams under strict deadlines, with the knowledge that it all has to come to a head in the form of a presentation to an established games company. That introduces pressure on the team and having experience keeping a team together under these pressures was invaluable experience and certainly helped all other times I worked in teams to produce games.

On the technical side I learnt Unreal Engine 4 a lot during this module, gaining an understanding of how to combine C++ with it's built in visual scripting language called blueprints. This enabled rapid prototyping with very fast iteration times as the compilation time on blueprints is nearly instant whereas C++ can take 5-10 minutes to compile each time.

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