Overview

MechHead is another group project which I took part in during Staffordshire University's 1UP placement scheme. The game is a top-down rogue-like game which involves the player shooting various projectiles from an array of equippable and unlockable weapons. The player can equip two guns - one on the left arm and one on the right arm. Guns can be randomly spawned when an enemy dies, or when the player enters the shop and purchases one. The game features a variety of different enemies each with different AI behaviours. This game was the winner of the TIGA Best Arcade Game 2023!

My Contribution

During this project, I was placed in the Tech team, and had the opportunity to implement a variety of different mechanics. Some of which include:

    Implementation of player dashing

    Implementation of all of the enemys' combat mechanics and AI behaviours through the use of behaviour trees

    Player score and saving the player's highscore

    Player respawning mechanic and lives system

    Custom Match Settings Feature

    QA Testing and Bug Fixes

Gameplay:

What I learnt during this project

During the development, I got to learn a lot of various skills such as how to use Unreal Engine, Working with other programmers of different skill levels to accomplish a task, communication within and outside of the Tech team, version-control software usage such as GitHub in a large team, and how to keep the project organised. Futhermore, I was assigned the task of working on the enemy mechanics such as their combat mechanics and AI behaviours which helped me learn a lot of Unreal Engine's features such as behaviour trees and the implementation of mechanics using blueprints.

This project was extremely fun to work on, and I am very proud of everyone who worked on it as we managed to win the TIGA Best Arcade Game Award 2023! I gained a lot of good memories, knowledge and friends from this project, which will help me in future projects.