Project Description
Construction Catastrophe is a local multiplayer game where the objective is to build up your construction site and then fight your friends to be the last one standing in a gang-beasts-style mess. While natural disasters try to destroy you and your building.
Winner for the Best Multiplayer Experience catgory at the CGD'23 GOTY Awards
Project Role
- Role: Gameplay Programmer
- Team Size: 16
- Time Frame: 6 weeks
- Engine & Language: Unreal with blueprint
Project Introduction
Construction Catastrophe was a group project I worked on during university in a module called Junior/Senior collab. For 6 weeks a team made of both final year and second year students worked together in an industry style team hierachy to make a game. The final years were the project leaders of the group.
During this 6 week sprint we managed to create a polished local multiplayer party game using only inhouse assets. This project was one of my first proper experiences working within a large development team and I managed to easily adjust to the environment. Like in every project you need to be versatile, not only did I need to work on various programming tasks, but I even had to be the MOCAP actor for the animations since no one else in the studio that day could fit into the suits!
Highlighted Mechanics
#1 Meteor Shower Disaster
One of the main mechanics I worked on was the meteor shower disaster. This required random sized meteors to start dropping from the sky across the map and to cause damage when they impacted the ground. Since I already had a great understanding of blueprint interfaces, the damage trigger to the surrounding buildings and players was an easy mechanic to make. The difficult part was random spawning. After extended testing with randomising vectors, I found the ideal range so all meteors would land within the map bounds.
#2 Weapon System
Another one of the main mechanic systems I worked on was the entirety of the weapon system. This included the pickup and drop system, weapon spawning on the map, the damage system and the UI icons. It was a massive development process that occupied a lot of my time during development, and was an important mechanic to give solely to a junior member of the team. However I had a great understanding of all the mechanics since I had worked on previous systems before so I managed to get it wall working with no issues. The
Project Reflection
Overall I am proud of my work on this project as it turned out great considering that we only had a 6 week development period and many of us juniors had not worked on a group project before. We even managed to win the Best Multiplayer experience award, so overall I would consider this a successful project
