Hamsterballin'
My first shipped title available now on Steam, Hamsterballin' had me wearing many hats to help my team create as good of a game as we could.
My Roles
In Hamsterballin's pre-production, I served primarily as a technical designer by setting up the pipeline to allow our team of 13 programmers to work concurrently with our 16 level designers.
Throughout production, I continued to support the team with troubleshooting the pipeline, but my primary role was as systems designer, leveraging my knowledge of Unreal's Blueprints to create, integrate, and balance the game's pickups.
Hamsterballin' Trailer
Post-Mortem Analysis
What Went Well
Building a solid foundation for Hamsterballin's pickups did wonders for iterating in the long run. Giving each pickup its own data asset prevented bottlenecks for the whole team.
What Went Poorly
This being my first project on such a large team, it was difficult to discern how formal a channel of communication to use depending on the information. In hindsight, over-documenting is always better than the alternative.
Even Better If...
When creating the jetpack powerup (which acted like the Bullet Bill from Mario Kart), I drew the spline one node at a time and placed them above the track. This led to the jetpack breaking anytime a change was made to any of the tracks. Parenting the jetpack spline to the track spline with an offset would have entirely bypassed this.