Prepare To Dine

Project Overview

• Objective: To create a fun and engaging first person shooter, implementing multiple weapon types as well as a complex recipe system.

• Gameplay: Players collect a recipe, before being beamed down into the alien world. Players must then race against the clock, cooking enemies as fast as possible using the 5 weapons at their disposal to season, flambé and roast their way through the recipe. Players then return to the hub and combine their ingredients, serving it to the alien before receiving their final score.

Skills and Experience Gained:

• Technical Skills:

  • Implemented all weapon systems, hierarchy and swapping, learning important concepts such as polymorphism.

  • Implemented the recipe system, a complex data system using maps/dictionaries, to handle different damage types combining to make a new ingredient, with a score system linked to each damage type.

  • Implemented the final iteration of our dash mechanic, a physics based movement ability.

  • Added difficulty settings and audio settings using UE4's save game states. 

  • Created multiple UI elements using UE4's UMG, such as a swapping weapon indicator, dash bar, menus and ammo counts.

  • Used GitHub as part of a team. As a junior member this was my first time using GitHub, which I picked up pretty quickly, learning what causes merge errors, how to avoid them and how to correctly use branches.

  • Used Jira as part of a team. This was also my first time using Jira, which was a pretty self explanatory system helping us keep on track of our tasks.

• Soft Skills:

  • Worked in a large group, communicating between disciplines such as design and art to implement high quality mechanics.

• Outcome:

  • I was a key member of the project, which turned out to be a great success for our group. Prepare To Dine was nominated for the TIGA awards and I received an overall grade of 93% for personal contributions in the module. My contributions, specifically the handling of layered weapon effects, were commended by lecturers in feedback.