Plague Wardens

Plague Wardens is a third-person coop horde shooter where an elite team of soldiers is deployed to obliterate hordes of mutant creatures using powerful guns and deployable air strikes, collecting food and medicine in the field to keep civilians alive back home.

My Contributions:
Team lead - Facilitated building a coop-multiplayer shooter in an accelerated college course by handling team stress as a first priority, bolstering others self-confidence, designing in group discussions, and reassigning, reimagining, or cutting features before burnout could occur.

Gameplay programmer - Built networked gameplay features in the Unreal 5 engine using blueprints and C++, such as the player’s weapon systems, throwable grenades, and an explosive special ability system that handles vehicle movement, friendly fire, and obliterating enemies, all reliably replicating between the server and client.


Challenges and Solutions:
The main personal challenge working on this project was this being my first large Unreal 5 project. Going in I had no idea how to use Perforce, very little Blueprint experience, and my years of C++ wasn't much help either, as to create a Blueprint C++ hybrid in Unreal is like learning an entirely new programming language, and being given 3 months to do it over the typical Full Sail single month project was a challenge all of its own. On top of all those other challenges this was also my first ever networked multiplayer shooter.
Each of these was a mountain to climb all on their own, but I think what helped me to learn and persevere more than anything else was being put in the position of team lead, where I had to step up and understand what I was doing on a deeper level fast, so that I could help others. This is exactly what I did, and by the end I was the main support for when anyone had challenges with getting networking to work properly (which was nearly every day, networking is known as being very hard for a reason, even with all of Unreal's incredible tools to make it easier), on top of creating the support abilities system.
The project was the hardest one I've worked on at Full Sail for all the right reasons - intense challenge, demanding stakes as this was our final project, a lot to learn, and at this point, every member of my team was a close friend and a skilled programmer, so rewarding collaboration made the whole project worthwhile, and I've gained a deep love for the Unreal Engine because of it. I'm very much look forward to many more projects in the engine in my future.