Dreamslayer

DreamSlayer is the game project from the second year of our innovative game development pedagogy. It was successfully released on Steam in Feb 2024 and has received over 40,000 library additions and over 2000 unique players, as well as great feedback with 92% of reviews being positive.

I have been fortunate enough to teach and work alongside some incredibly dedicated and talented students this year, and I am overjoyed to share in their successes in this project!

Applying my learnings from the previous year, I have been able to achieve a significantly higher quality project with greater outcomes for the students. There were two major factors in this, which I plan to further apply and improve to future iterations of this program:

One of our major focuses is to simulate conditions in which students would work under in the games industry, including the rarity of beginning a project fully from scratch; rather, utilizing an existing codebase as a springboard for the new project. For Orkus: Scion of the Wyrm, we utilized a project framework sourced from the Unreal Marketplace. The quality of the framework was acceptable, but the unfamiliarity of it for our staff, and lack of documentation, resulted in a lot of poorly developed solutions and a rats' nest of code by the end of the year. To prevent this issue, I took it upon myself to develop a framework over the first few months of the semester, utilizing the Gameplay Ability System (GAS) within Unreal. Utilizing GAS as our foundation was a huge benefit, as it allowed students to utilize official and community documentation when they were developing new additions, instead of wandering half-blind. Developing the solution in-house also allowed us to develop our own documentation, utilizing the GitHub Wiki section to make it easy for students to access.