Project Overview
This Game was created on a part time contract for Studio SE, a Denver-based Company who offers instructional courses on Model Based Systems Engineering and SysML (a modeling and documentation language very similar to UML). They were attending a trade conference and wanted a video game to present in their booth as an attraction. They hired me as the sole designer and programmer to create this video game for them. While the final design was simpler than most of my projects, this was largely due to a few particular constraints. Most notably, the development cycle was only a month long, with myself as the sole contractor and an average maximum of 30 hours a week.
Despite these constraints, I was also given substantial independence on the project, being responsible for the design and project management of the game. Drawing from the educational nature of my Clients’ Business model, I designed a game in which the player would utilize their knowledge of SysML syntax to answer prompted questions and navigate the level. After laying out the original design, I then planned out a milestone schedule to ensure manageable expectations within the tight deadline. I planned single week sprints for each major phase of development: initial prototyping, a Minimum Viable Product, and content completion. I also set aside an extra week at the end to allow ample room for any additional tasks which tend to arise during the latter phases of any game project.
The technical infrastructure involved presenting questions that were randomly selected from a preset array of custom data assets, then Unreal’s event callback system would activate various effects based on the accuracy of their answer. After successfully answering five questions and reaching the end, the player would then be added to the leaderboard. The Leaderboard data was stored with Unreal’s SaveGame feature and the FFileHelper library to generate a .xml file accessible outside the game. The final product was very successful, with high popularity at the conference and gleaming feedback from my clients. I'm very proud of the work I completed and my management of the project's constraints.