FINISH LINE | Junior Mafuta

ROLE

Game Designer & QA Tester

Team Size

Project Link

itch.io

LENGTH OF DEVELOPMENT

2nd January 2023 - 10th February 2023

GENRE

Racing

PLATFORM

Unreal Engine 5

Trailer

Walkthrough

SOFTWARE

Project Overview

Finish Line was my first true experience working in a designated design team alongside other disciplines and I was able to grasp the importance of a development pipeline and communication in a project. My main responsibility was to create diagrams for the obstacle and power up items for the design team to give feedback on, the prop artist to make suitable meshes and props for and the tech team to then implement them into the game.

Key contributions

Obstacle Diagrams

I discussed with the design lead ways to incorporate potential pet-shop hazards into obstacles for the game and designed them.

Power-Up Diagrams

I also discussed with the design team ways to incorporate pre-existing power-ups from classic racing titles into our game and designed some of them.

Research Documents

I documented my research into different elements of racing titles such as feedback loops and balancing to share with the design lead and discuss any potential new tasks to distribute.

QA Testing

I ended up serving as the main QA tester towards the end of the project and gave a lot of feedback for the tech team.

Post-Mortem

Amongst the design team, I think we worked well together. Regarding design tasks, everyone had enough to do, no one had too much to do and everyone played a part in the major design decisions. Also we were all quite present both in person and online, especially in the earlier stages of the project, where design is most important. Amongst the entire team, there were definitely communication breakdowns at points between and even within teams that halted and affected the progress of the project, but I think the leads worked well to ensure it never got too out of hand.

The main issue I had in this project was that I rarely had much confidence in the work I produced when presenting it to other members and also wasn't confident enough to offer a hand in helping the tech team when the amount of tasks they had had started to become overwhelming. Additionally, designing a racing game was foreign to me.

Communication between the design and tech teams was constant and confusions between the two were ironed out relatively quickly for the most part at the very least which is always extremely helpful in a group project. Communication within the design team was also great as previously mentioned and there was a fair amount of very present members from all teams which once again is always extremely helpful.

This was my first large group project so I've definitely learnt some stuff like the importance of making diagrams generally understandable rather than personally understandable, the importance of remaining present and punctual throughout the duration of the project's development and the importance of remaining organised. I've definitely left this project feeling more confident in myself and have probably become a better and more efficient designer as a result of working under a very competent lead designer. I definitely have gained a greater understanding of racing game and how hard it is to make a good one due to the various variables at hand.

In future group projects, I will look to be much more present as previously mentioned. Despite how successful I felt the communication process was amongst the design team was, I will definitely look to consider a more documented approach especially regarding Jira tasks for the team's sake. I definitely aim to be much more component in Unreal as I would like to be able to help the group out more as the progression of the project gets to the point where it's more reliant on technical implementation than any new design features.