Dune Ball
Dune Ball is a game I created during a summer internship with 31st Union in 2021 over the span of 3 months. Amongst a team of 4 total interns, I contributed my design and programming skills to utilize the Unreal Engine and create a working multiplayer prototype that was play tested by the company's 80+ employees.
For the internship my team was initially tasked with creating a game that allowed for dynamic social interactions between it's players. Our team then pitched 3 different ideas for games that would fulfil this requirement: A horde survival game where players could choose different methods of defeating enemies that would change their karmic alignment to be either for or against other survivors, A free-for-all sports based game where players could work together to score points as a team or work on their own to take the points for themselves, and a boss rush game where after defeating a boss, a single player could attempt to take it's power for themselves and fight against their former allies. We were then approved to work on the sports game as it seemed most reasonable given our time frame.
Over the next 3 months, I was tasked with developing the prototype of our game in the Unreal Engine. As this was my first time using the engine, and considering the scope of our game and allotted time span for development, I choose to use the blueprint method of programming as it made development of the game relatively smooth and helped me get familiar with Unreal's structure. This was also my first time working on a game that would have network based multiplayer so I was able to gain the experience of managing whether events should be client side or server side. Ultimately, we were able to successfully present the game to the studio's employees during a networked play test at the end of the internship.