Poker Purgatory - Bluffers Grim (Student team)

CORE CONTRIBUTIONS:
Gameplay design:
As the team's designated designer, I helped develop the gameplay concepts, primarily in the FPS half of the game. I was very inspired by my love for classic shooters, and wanted to adapt what worked well in those games into our more experimental formula. I closely watched the feedback from each playtest, and adjusted the difficulty and mechanics based on it- the final difficulty selection was a last-minute addition when I found that some testers were still struggling!
Technical design:

Using Unreal Engine blueprints, I prototyped many features for the programmers to then replace or build upon with C++.
Enemy design:

A major setback in this project was the loss of our character artist, who left us with only a few materials to use. Because of this, I spearheaded an effort to design a whole new set of enemies that worked to the strength of our remaining team. This meant a lot of variations of the character models we did have, or enemies that would require less involved animation work (such as the slot mimic, which was designed entirely to use a single environment asset that we already had!)
Sound design and audio mixing:

As our team lacked anyone who specialised in audio, it fell to me to implement the audio. I gathered many stock sounds from various sources, but I spent a lot of time mixing and editing them to make it all stand out.
Narrative design:
While story isn't a big part of this game, I still figured it was important to add context that would breathe life into the world instead of just having a mindless shooting gallery. I added various bits of fluff across the entire project, ranging from enemy descriptions, to small text intros and intermissions that many players really seemed to appreciate!

Additional game systems: 

While the programmers were focused on major elements, I ended up developing multiple smaller background elements, such as the dialogue system used for the in-game tutorials. This dialogue system repurposed a system originally developed for a canned solo project, so I'm happy that it lives on somewhere!
Project pitching and market research:

As part of the project requirements, my team had to pitch this project to prove that it was viable. One of the major elements I showed was identifying and capitalising on the growing market of "gambling-based" indie games that were novel at the time, with hits such as Balatro. I also correctly predicted that soon many other developers would also be releasing games like this, so by the time we DID release, our game seemed less unique... If only we finished it sooner!

SUPPLEMENTAL CONTRIBUTIONS:

- Bug fixes
- UI design + additional UI art assets
- Additional textures (enemies, items, world)
- Promotional materials (For the web codex app, see HERE.)

This was my third (and final) year group project at Falmouth University! When I joined the team, they

had already settled on a gambling/action game of some kind, and I helped determine the first-person direction due to my love for old-school shooters such as Quake and Serious Sam.
It's been a great learning experience overall, which again highlighted the value of adjusting plans based on development feedback, and further expanded my knowledge of Unreal Engine 5.

We were a very small team compared to others in this year who faced some big setbacks early on, but I am extremely proud of what we accomplished.