The Concept:

The team decided to create a 3D First Person Bullet Hell game. The game aimed to let the player experience the bullet hell game in a very different aspect where the player will control the character moving around inside the room. The limitation of view provided a much more challenging gaming experience compared to the traditional bullet hell game.

What Went Right:

Team:

• Game Engine：

  • Since the majority of the team member in the team has some experience with the Unreal engine, and there are more than enough resource documents and videos regarding each feature development, the team was able to develop most of the features without too much struggle.

• Scope:

  • The team managed to keep the scope under management and adjust to it during the development process. With the straightforward mechanics to implement, the team managed to deliver a finished project within a short period of time.

• Version Control:

  • Since there are four developers on the team, the team recognized that merge conflict will be inevitable during the development process. By establishing version control practices in the early stage of the development, the team managed to work on their project on their own branch and later push it into the main branch without too much problem.

Individual:

• Teammates

  • Most of the team member was very easy to work with and competent enough to share the load with them during the development process, the work quality is more than ideal when it comes to assigning feature. This definitely saved a lot of time in trying to understand others’ work and adjust it to implement the feature into the wave system.

What Went Wrong:

Team:

• Lack of chain of command

  • Although it is a good thing that most of the members are contributing to the project, due to the lack of one member calling all the shots when it comes to finalizing the feature development, there is some chaos happening during the making of the production documentation.

• Unreal 5.0

  • It is very exciting to develop a game using the newer game engine. However, due to the new version still being refined, some of the features that can be developed easily using the older version turned into a nightmare when it comes to using version 5.0.3. For example, the leaderboard feature can be accomplished by importing a plugin from the earlier version caused a messy conflict leads to build errors which eventually affected the pass rate of the project.

• Artist

  • The developers on this team are very easy to work with and always responsive when communicating. However, this can not be applied to the artist on the team. the artist barely communicate with the team and even failed to respond to the message sent by the developers. On top of that, the artist on the team seems to be only working on what he feels like doing which caused a lot of problems during the development process. For example, the artist decided to add 600 objects for decoration purposes to the map on the last day of development which causes severe performance drops that makes the Testing process much harder.

Reflections:

• Establish leadership position:

  • A shot caller is definitely needed when it comes to finalizing the features. Although it is a small team, it still took a while to make sure everyone on the team is on the same page. For future reference, having one person make all the final decisions is definitely helpful when it comes to making sure the test plan and production documents are done properly.

• Better research:

  • Unreal Engine version 5.0 is a good tool for game development. However, judging from the experience level the team has, it definitely brings more disadvantages to the team this time. For future projects, the team should research each member’s capability and the difficulty of each feature being developed using the specific engine version to make sure there won’t be too much risk using that tool.

• Utilize asset store:

  • Without a doubt, there are talented artists out there who are more than capable to help the team with the project. However, a simple concept like this should’ve used the asset store during the implementation than asking an artist to spend hours creating simple objects like a turret and spike trap.