Overview

Role: Lead Programmer, Scrum Master

Genre: Vehicular Combat Game

Engine: Unreal Engine 4

Team Size: 14 People

Development Time: 3 months

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About Candy Slam

    Candy Slam is a vehicle-based, combat party game that supports single-player as well as a 2-4 multi-player game mode. In the game, players will play as goblins, sprites, and elves from a magical kingdom, who gather in Candy Land to compete in the Grand Candy Slam Tournament. Players must bump vehicles using timing, tactics, and nitrogen acceleration to cause damage to their enemies in an attempt to claim victory.

    Player controlled karts are contained inside of an arena map along with several AI enemies. The players’ main goal is to score points by slamming their kart into other karts. There are 3 different kart types to choose from and they each have their own unique skill to aid them in the competition. Useful buffs can also be found on the map from time to time.

    Candy Slam was developed over the course of 4 months by Little Strong Studio, a team of 14 graduate students at SMU Guildhall. Each team member logged over 75 hours of development time. The work on this game provided the team with valuable experience developing a UE4 game project under a tight, fast-paced schedule. Team members learned how to collaborate cross discipline, balance their workload, establish pipelines, and manage source control, all while working remotely!

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Scrum Master Responsibilities

• Hold daily scrum meeting

• Documentations

• Sprint planning

• Monday maintenance

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Lead Programmer Responsibilities

• Architecture design

• Deliverable negotiation

• Cross-Discipline communication

• Conflict Resolution

• Source Control maintenance

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Programmer Responsibilities

• Make configuration table for LDs to make this game data-driven

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• Performance Optimization

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• Camera

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• UI animation

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• Destructible Elements

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Post Mortem

What Went Well

• Learned a lot about project management.

• Touched many details from prototyping to final product.

• Team communication was great. We hold several designing meeting and every team member can freely share their thoughts and suggestions in there.

• Leads team accounted for the resources available and planned milestones to maximize our efficiency

What Went Wrong

• We crunched several times because of the big scope and little amount of programmers.

• We didn't set the priority list for all the tasks, and it caused some blockers in the early milestones.

• We didn't make detailed documentations for other discipline to read.

What Needs Work

• Should make the configuration table earlier which may rise the working efficiency of LDs.

• Should plan more detailed and think about scope before real production.