Overview

Mental Block is a group game project which I took part in during Staffordshire University's 1UP Placement Scheme. The game is a puzzle game, and includes a hundred levels which the player can complete by pushing blocks, activating triggers and gates, and avoiding obstacles. The game has not yet been released, however, it is aimed to be released on platforms for mobile and PC games. It has also been shortlisted for the TIGA Best Puzzle Game Awards 2023.

My Contribution

During this project, I got to take part in both the Tech team and Design team, and had the opportunity to implement a variety of different mechanics. Some of which include:

    Tool for placing in and programming enemy AI's movements in the level making editor.

    Tool for exporting and importing levels into the game.

    Creation of some of the levels

    Help with the implementation of some of the Art Team's assets, such as level backgrounds, environments, lighting, materials and tweeking of assets.

    QA Testing and Bug Fixing

The game does not have its own trailer, however, clips of it can be seen in the Staffordshire University's 1UP Trailer 2023.

Trailer:

What I learnt during this project

During this project, I learnt a lot about project managment and communication between different departments. Students from different levels and courses were seperated into Art, Design and Tech teams, and contributed to the project based on what their strengths are. I gained a lot of knowledge and understanding of how to work as a team with different departments, and share skills to accomplish a big goal. I mainly use C++ when creating a project in Unreal Engine, however, to make the project easy to understand and accessible to designers, the Tech team made sure to implement core functionality in C++, and then expose parts of the code which may need to be accessible to designers and artists to blueprint. This helped me gain skills in not only writing scripts in blueprints, but also making the codespace easily readable and accessible to all members of the project's development.

This project was extremely fun to work on, and I wish it lasted longer than it did. I got to learn a lot from my peers, make a lot of new friends, and learn a lot of useful skills which would be helpful in future group projects.