Minigame Mayhem

Summary

Role: Lead Game Designer

Purpose: Uni Third Year Collaboration Module

Date Duration: January 10th-28th and May 9th-27th 2022

This was a collaboration project I did within a small team. As a third year I had to take up a senior leadership role so I became the lead game designer for the project. We created a collection of minigames that can be played locally with 4 players.

What is Minigame Mayhem?

Minigame Mayhem is a game that is made up of a series of minigames that are 4 player local multiplayer. This project was for a university collaboration module that required students to work in groups of around 15 people. Within my group, I took the role of Lead Game Designer.

This project was created in Unreal Engine 4 and everything found in the game was designed and created by the team. From the assets to the sounds and music as well as the mechanics and animations.

Role and Purpose:

Minigame Mayhem was a project I worked on during my final year of university. I had a collaboration module where I worked in a group of around 15 people and we needed to design and create a game. For this project, I put myself forward to be the lead designer. I had the job of making sure my design team had tasks to be working on, as well as communicating with the art and programming leads.

What I did:

I lead a team of designers.
- I assigned the junior designers tasks and made sure they knew what they were doing.
I communicated between the other leads.
- I was in constant talks with the art and programming leads to make sure we were all on the same page.
- I also had to communicate we some members of our team online due to them being in London and us being in Stoke.
I designed and created the Vampire Tag minigame.
- I also designed the Sumo minigame and started to implement it in engine before assigning the task to a junior.
- I helped finish off the development of the Dodgeball minigame and the Colour Shuffle minigame.
I created all of the cutscenes in the project using Unreal sequences.
I created the gameplay trailer along with two of team members.

Software Used:

Unreal Engine 4 - The game engine used to create the game
GitHub - The software used to work on the project at the same time on different branches
Photoshop - I used to design minigame levels and mechanics
Premiere Pro - I used to create the game trailer
Miro - I used to create the minigame flow diagrams
Microsoft Teams - We used to communicate with each other

Extra Details:

As a game design lead, my job was to work closely with other leads making sure we were all on the same page and within scope for the project. I also had a responsibility to give tasks to the team of game designers making sure they knew what they had to do.

Because the game revolves around lots of smaller minigames, it was very easy to set tasks for my team of game designers. The minigames we had were: Vampire Tag, Sumo, Falling Fruits, Dodgeball, Disco Colour Shuffle, Obstacle Course, Fishing and a Shooting Range. Due to lack of time and some issues the fishing and shooting minigames were dropped from the final build to keep the project within scope.

We had a really good team of designers and I was able to tell them a minigame to work on and what needs improving/fixing in that minigame and they would go and work on it with no complaints. We did not have a very big tech team, so us designers who were not as confident in engine needed to step up and work not only on designing the minigames but getting them functioning and playable in engine, and everyone did step up. If there was ever any problems we talked in a group and were able to solve each others problems. The few tech guys we had were also amazing but they we working from London whereas we were working in Stoke. There were times when communicating across the country was hard, but we managed to make it work and it really paid off because I am happy with the game we made.

To summarise my contributions, I helped create the GDD with my level design plans, mechanic, diagrams and flowcharts. I created the Vampire Tag minigame, started off getting all the basic functionality of the Sumo minigame, help finish off and improve the Disco Colour Shuffle and Dodgeball minigames. And then I implemented assets and animations into the project. As well as creating intro cutscenes for all the levels, a trailer for the game and controller diagrams for each minigame.

Overall, I am very pleased and happy with the final outcome of this game. Most of the team I was working with were really good and put in a lot of effort for this project. We did have more ideas and things we would have liked to of include but with limited time and limited team members, we recognised our scope and knew where our limit was. This is one major bug that is an issue we know about but we tried to fix and couldn't but other than that everything, to my knowledge, works fine.

Game Design Document:

Click the icon below to be taken to a PDF of the Game Design Document I created.