C77

C77 Entertainment

Project Slingshot (Online Multiplayer Shooter)

Role(s): Technical Designer

Team Size: 13 people

Engine: Unreal Engine 4

Platform(s): PC

Worked 04/2020 - 12/2020

*Worked remote for the entire time

C77 Entertainment is gaming company working on an unannounced project. Due to signing a NDA I cannot disclose everything I have worked on at this company, nor show any video footage said work.

Designed and Implemented SpawnZone System To Improved Designer Workflow

I was in charge of getting the spawn system much easier to use. I made it easy to see at a glance where the spawn points where and made sure that the gamemode was ensuring spawn point validity. More specifically what I did was:

Allowed developers to place spawn points manually while being able to see what location and direction the player will spawn in.
Maintained accurate information that was always pulled from the server.
Updated the spawning logic to ensure the gamemode was always choosing a valid spawn point for the player.

C77_SpawnPoints

Adding and removing widgets on the fly

C77_UI

Designed and Implemented an UI Management System To Add and Remove Widgets Intuitively

Designed and implemented an UI management system to add and remove widgets intuitively. It automatically:

Manages widget layering and prevents duplicates.
Set what widget the user has selected and what inputs they can use.
Dynamically change UI visibility based on playerstate.

Adding and removing widgets on the fly

Wrote Documentation with Supplementary Materials like Gifs, Images, and Source Assets

I wrote documentation for the above tools that included supplementary materials like gifs, images and source assets. Included were:

How to add and remove UI.
Relevant asset file paths.
Breakdown of generally useful functions.
When to use certain interfaces and why.

C77_Doc

C77_DesignerWorkflow

Created UI Designer Workflow Improvements

While working on the UI system listed above I made in-game UI and found some ways to improve the process. The two big ones were:

The ability to get player specific color values that were needed for some UI. Previously they were called in an inefficient way that wasn't performance friendly, so I created a purecast node that would handle the entire process in a performant way.
Premade custom button widgets that designers could drag and drop into widgets that would have all their functionality working (hover/select/etc color, tell it's owner it was clicked, etc).

Populated UI with Server Accurate Information

I created UI that pulled info from the server to keep server accurate info that was performant.

C77_ServerAccurateUI

Overrode Source Code to Better Control Player Spawning Process

We needed more control over the spawning process so I looked in the source code to find what functions we needed to override. We did this through blueprints so no-one needed to be able to use C++ to update the functionality.

C77_OverrodeSourceCode