• What I learnt

Personally, I have found the Beta Arcade module to have been an invaluable experience as part of my professional and academic journey in becoming a games designer. I have sharpened my pre-existing skills in areas such as level and mechanic prototyping, systems designing and set dressing, ensuring my blockouts were clean and my level was visually appealing. I gained knowledge in creating a chain attack combat system for the first time, I set up our custom melee animations on our custom rigged character and helped to set up our movement animations.

Overall, I generally furthered my visual scripting within Unreal Engine by making blueprints that I've never made before and refreshed my skills in creating core gameplay systems for the character. I feel as if I was a valuable member of the team, providing feedback both online and in labs and troubleshooting game breaking issues with other members of the team by suggesting relevant tutorials and peer reviewing code.  
 

• What I was aiming for

We were aiming in this project to create fun and exciting experience that fits in with the narrative given (Mario Kart: Recharged) drawing inspiration from other similar arcade style racing games. The idea we came up with was that the map would start in a child's bedroom and then you would fly through their TV screen into a mirrored version of the track into the child's imagination where the toys had come to life.​

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• What could've gone better?

I feel that the general gameplay loop, AI enemies and overall polish was what suffered the most in this project and let us down while presenting our game demonstration to marking lecturers. This was due despite trying to avoid feature creep during development and cutting a lot of planned content from our MVP (Minimum Viable Product) it still managed to affect us due most of us being too inexperienced when trying to develop some of these complex systems planned in our game for the first time.