Project Overview
This game was originally created for the 2024 Global Game Jam, with the theme "make me laugh". The mechanical premise of the game was a minigame centric battle royale with the central win/loss mechanic being based around laughter. Collecting some items (such as the whoopie Cushion or air horn) would allow you to force other players to laugh, while others (doing taxes) would decrease your own, laugh value, represented by a meter on the UI. When players had higher laugh values they would move faster. This established a sense of risk-reward, as if their meter reached the max value, they would lose control over laughter, thus being eliminated from the game. We added three separate Game Modes, each with unique win conditions. King of the Hill allowed players to earn points by standing in control zones that would periodically shift around the map. An obstacle course awarded the first player to reach the end. And the Last Man Standing was a free for all in which the player still alive and with the lowest laugh meter at the end of the round would win.
I hadn't taken on as firm of a leadership role in this project as I had in others. This was due to wanting to focus on the technical aspects and refamiliarize myself with Unreal Engine, which I hadn't used in some time, and would be using to work on Bitwise Key. The main contributions I provided were implementing the players item abilities, as well as the logic surrounding the three different game modes (as in the options for game modes visible to the players, as well as Unreal Engine's Game Mode and Game State infrastructure). This involved creating the Base Game Mode, as well as two children to handle the added rulesets in King of the Hill and the Obstacle Course. Even in a less leadership-oriented role, my skills still came in handy for instructing my less experienced team members on how to use Git, acting as intermediary between them and the most experienced developers, and even resolving all of the major git issues that arose.