Project Description
Miasma is a 4 player LAN Co-Op dungeon crawler game, where players must work together to stop the spread of miasma in a victorian crypt. They must dodge the miasma which can give them weird effects, collect artifacts for potions and exterminate the mutated wildlife in the tunnels.
Project Info
Role: Co-Lead Programmer
Team Size: 27
Time Frame: 10 Weeks
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Team Management
With this being a Senior collab module, it was now my turn to be one of the project leads. Since we had another final year programmer on the team, we decided to share the lead programmer role between us. I created the repository and we were both in charge of managing commits made by the team to prevent merge conflicts. I also was in task of task assigment, and by using an MS-Planner board made sure tasks were being completed by the team, and development progress aligned with the time-frame the producer had laid out for us.
Main Contribution
Aside from implementing the weapons system and various other player and UI mechanics, my main contribution to this project was ensuring every mechanic worked on the LAN multiplayer system. Firstly I had to make the UI work with the blueprint session creation nodes. With LAN working, and being the only person on the team with sufficient experience in working with multiplayer games. I was in charge of converting mechanics made by other members of the programming team to work on LAN. This included the Miasma spread system, mission and objective system, weapons system, VFX and crafting.
Project Reflection
Overall I think I did a good job as a lead programmer on this project. Not only did I ensure the LAN system from the game's pitch was implemented, but also that everyone's mechanics worked with it. I do think I could have improved on the task management side of things, as towards the final two weeks of development myself and the team forgot to frequently update the board. So although, I knew if development was behind or not because everyone was just polishing the systems they had developed, the lack of documentation is something that would be brought up as an issue in an industry setting. So is definitely, something to improve upon.
