Project Description

A comical competitive local multiplayer party game, where players play as crabs and compete in minigames using popsicle sticks to complete objectives and score points.

Project Info

Role: Lead Programmer

Team Size: 15

Time Frame: 10 Weeks

Engine & Language: Unreal with Blueprint and C++

Project Introduction

Crab Sticks is a local multiplayer party game developed under the University of Staffordshire's 1UP scheme. This is where students are hired over the summer holidays to make new games and work on existing IPs made by the University.

I worked on the project during it's entire 10 week development period and was a senior programmer. In the last two weeks a small portion of the team were paid to stay on and polish the game further, during this period I became the lead tech of the project, as the previous lead opted to not stay on.

Highlighted Mechanics

#1 UI Systems

My main tasks on this game was creating various UI systems before gameplay actually began. This included the player join screen which allowed players to join by pressing A on their controller. Here they could also set a custom 3 character name for themselves.

Another main UI system I worked on was the custom minigame selection screen. Here players could scroll through available minigames depending on player count. Some minigames were 3 players only and had to be toggled depending on current player count.

#2 Bug Fixes

As one of the lead programmers, I was often asked by members of the design team or my other programmers to fix various bugs that cropped up during QA testing. A major bug I fixed was an issue we head with random team assignment. We wanted players during team games to have random teams and for the winning players to not be paired up. This feature was not working during 3 player games, so I had to write extra conditions to prevent buggy team spawning.

Project Reflection

Overall this project turned out really well, all the team worked well together and we had a good workflow of task assignment and great communication since we were all in the same office space working on the game. It was definetely a success since the project was nominated for several TIGA awards in the 2025 awards.