The Difficulties of  Dead Isaac: A Postmortem

Engine: Unreal Engine 4 | Team Size: 10 | Duration: 4 weeks

Game Overview

Dead Isaac is a Top-down Twin Stick shooter made in Unreal Engine 4. This game was created in one month as a class project. The player starts off in a bunker in a sci-fi setting, where the objective is to escape the facility and kill any enemies that are in their way. I focused on the player controller, health system, and weapon system.

The beginning

This project started off as a class discussion in what kind of game we wanted to make. We went through several different ideas of what to create, some meme ideas, some easy ideas that we knew we could pull off, and then we came up with the idea of a twin-stick shooter made in Unreal Engine 4. This was very exciting for us as we were all comfortable using Unity, but wanted to gain experience using Unreal and create a great piece for our portfolios. It all started good during the first class, but then everything changed.

What went wrong

There were several things that went wrong with me and the team all month. The difficulties that I had were related to learning how everything worked in Unreal. I researched a lot of tutorials that allowed me to create most things that I was wanting to make. There were several issues that I could get working in Unity, but was more difficult to figure it out in Unreal and some things I wasn’t able to create. There several issues with what the team was wanting to create and the documentation around it. Some of the documentation we were given was confusing or misleading, and when something would be done, others would say it wasn’t. We didn’t ask each other for help or discuss the design of how the game would actually play. Asset implementation was difficult for us due to the time it took to implement certain features, and we did not have enough time for the art to get in 100%.

what went right

There several things that did go right for me and the team. Being able to learn more about the Unreal Engine was the biggest thing that went right for me. I understand more about how blueprints work and how you can utilize them to create features. I was able to create our player character and create a modular weapon system that could easily be inherited off of. I was able to create a modular health system by making it a component that could be added to any asset in the game. There were several things that went right for the team as well. We worked on making a game and would get as many things implemented into the project that we could. We were organized when it came to what everybody was working on and would discuss what needed to be done and fixed before heading into each milestone. We had deadlines that we needed to meet for each milestone that we would reach and test to make sure things were working and shown off correctly.

In Conclusion

There were several things that could have gone better and will work to improve going forward. The team needs to discuss what we want to work on and what we need to fix, and then we need to update documentation to show what we are working on each week. We should focus more on the quality of everything instead of quantity, as this caused some issues and have us over-scoped trying to create everything. The team needs to collaborate more when working, as we work from home and don’t interact much outside of class. The team also should look over the documentation and keep everything up to date on what we are working on.