The Spiral Village
About the project:
The Spiral Village is a short game we made for the Game Design 4: Level Design course at Uppsala University. The game was our first dive into using Unreal Engine 5. This project was also the second project I made with the team Chonk Cats Productions and not the last one.
We started on this project during the second assignment of the course, where we were tasked with making a short level/small space focused on environmental storytelling. The teacher had advised the class to use asset packs for the assignment due to the time available for the course and this assignment. However, as a team, we had decided early on that we would create as many assets as possible ourselves for this course. We chose to do this so we could use this project as a training ground for the larger project during the Game Production 2: Vertical Slice course later in the year. See how that project turned out here.
Based on a short prompt we received in an earlier in-class assignment, I pitched the concept for this game to the team. The idea I had come up with was a village that had been consumed by a Lovecraftian cult, which altered the structure of the village. As the player would progress through the village, they would spiral into the centre of the village and its evangelical TV cult, with some opportunities to escape. After pitching it to the team, I wrote off the idea immediately because I thought the scale of the game would be too large for the time available. The team disagreed with me on this part and wanted to make this game, so when assignment 2 rolled around we started production. Later we continued working on the game for assignment 3 and passed the assignment with the highest grade (VG) possible.
My work on the project
At the start of the project, I came up with the idea of the game, which was then improved upon by the entire team. Throughout the project I took on a leading role in the sense of leading production. I wanted to use this opportunity to get more acquainted with the role of producer, but at times also took on a product owner role. Alongside this, I also took on the role of a UE5 blueprint programmer.
With the scale of the assignment that had been presented to us, we had decided to use Trello for this project instead of Jira. This choice may have made sense with the teacher’s advice to use pre-made assets for the project. But quickly, our use of Trello turned out not to be capable of fully handling all of our needs. Most specifically, we felt this on the graphics side of the project. To fill up this gap, I made a sheet in Google Sheets where we tracked the work on the art assets for the project. After a few Kanban lectures in the Project Management with Agile Methods 2 course I was following at the same time, I started using this as a sort of Kanban light. Since the artists on the team found this way of working very beneficial, we immediately made use of this at the start of The Social Grip’s production as well.
I chose to work as a UE5 blueprints programmer on this project for a few different reasons. The programming student we had on our team wanted to explore new skills, and I had done some smaller scale programming on other projects. With the complexity of the game mechanics in mind, I took this as an opportunity to get acquainted with blueprint programming in UE5. I found this very beneficial by the end of the project, as it had given me some more insight into the work of a programmer on an Unreal Engine project.
