In partnership with:

[Headphones recommended]

• University Team Project to design and implement a mini game for children as requested by Hopewood Hospital.

• Angry birds/fruit ninja crossover with visual theming based on Robin Hood, due to the client being based in Sherwood, Nottingham.

• Took over as team leader and gameplay designer due to lockdown related complications.

• Began as a sound designer & composer.

• Completed original work and also assisted in programming, QA and animation as required to see project to completion.

Tasked with creating an app for siblings of patients of Hopewood, a children’s mental health hospital, I worked with my team to create a cross between Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja, as a mini-game that could distract from a child or teenager's worries.

Communications on this project were impeded by the pandemic coming into full force in March 2020 however, and towards the end we were put in a position where we either accepted the project could fail, or I could take on a multitude of extra responsibilities in place of my team members who had lost resources.. I chose the latter.

Having started off as simply the sound designer, this project taught me to persevere and become an even stronger team player. With our team leader now forced into a poor working environment, our programmer cut off from internet access and our lead designer losing hope, I took over the project to fill in these gaps as the new team leader, lead programmer and co-designer.

Quickly I learned that we did not even have the programmer’s latest build, which meant I had to work tightly with our lead designer to catch up and make sure I was coding his vision for the game, as a full design document had not been developed between him and our team leader. Eventually he would pull out of the project given the uphill battle our original team leader had left us with, which left me with full control over design decisions that had yet to be decided upon.

Later, I discovered that there had been a miscommunication as to who would be animating our assets, as it had been believed that our artist would also animate his work, but he was convinced that it was somebody else. Having never animated before beyond basic PowerPoint presentations, I took the time research flipbook animations in UE4 and do the work myself.

Overall this project presented many unexpected challenges, but using the foundations of the rest of the team’s work prior to lockdown, I saw it to completion. If I’d had more time, or my team had not fallen apart, the arrow angle and animation would change in response to the angle the player chooses to shoot at, but I had prioritised programming the main mechanics, to produce a working game despite the setbacks out of my control.