The above artifact was a project where we used Unreal Engine without side coding and plugins to create a game outside of mostly using the blueprint system inside Unreal. This project is from 2019 and was the first project I even spent time working on code outside unreal to work inside unreal. 

   I chose to show this artifact in my portfolio to show my personal growth and the efforts of what a class that basically just worked with adding and creating code outside unreal and getting it to translate into Unreal and then designing a game from a basic paintball game tutorial. I then transformed that into the minigame like game it is now from that idea. I really enjoyed being given assets in a way and having creative freedom to then try and turn that into a working game. This project I felt shows off more creativity and ability to design a functional game system than a game world and story line. I feel like this game shows off more of how to create something fast from basic assets and then focus on the fun aspects of play to try and create ideas from that. I feel that the randomness and non world setting of the game allows for many possible maps in the future and continued expansion past the point it currently is. The artifact shows off my ability to change and edit the game mechanics and create GUI and timer and score based systems. This asset also focused on my ability to code and fix errors along the design process. 

  Working on this project as an artifact was actually one of my fears to take on as in the past and even when I started to revise this project I had a very hard time with a ton of errors across the whole of its creation and storage. From constant crashes within the code that myself and the professor couldn't find the cause of the errors to a crashed database and more I have probably done more work to maintain, fix and correct bugs with this project than any before. This project really pushed me to my abilities to find errors and fix them on my own and though using outside resources to create the functional project it is today. However even at the stage where everything finally began to work I found that how I was going to do the GUI for the game and menus was affected by a version bug and I was unable to fix it thus changing how I did those menus. I found a lot of what I have learned and studied and retained throughout this program was used in this project even though on the grand scale it's a smaller project in content. By incorporating feedback I was able to fix more bugs and issues even though I did not see having been so focused on other areas of the game. Without the opinion and outlook of others I would not have been able to fix these issues as effectively and for that I was very grateful. Through the combined efforts of myself and the feedback I received I was able to create a good prototype from what was a very simple prototype project with a major case of bugs.