Sprite's City Scramble

SCS was a university based team project that, in the beginning, I myself was not a part of. Towards the end of the assignment, team lead Henry Bunn realised that due to the team's small number of technical designers and programmers, the game had many glaring issues that made the game hard to play and subtracted from the experience. Seeing this, i offered to help prepare the game for submission alongside my work on my own team project. This would include continuing work for the Game Republic Student Showcase, which the game was shown off at on the 17th of June 2025.

The game featured a parasite names Sprite, which needed to escape the city through exploration, puzzles and parkour. Sprite could take control of different animals such as a cat or a pigeon, to help with puzzles and exploration. Each animal had a unique ability.

My work started as a small bug fixing roll but quickly expanded after discussions with the team. I presented some ideas for features that would help the experience in the game. The team was on board and allowed me access so I could get to work

My main contributions included

The cat climbing system - Due to how it was set up, the climbing system needed an entirely new rework. I used a line trace when the cat was jumping to detect if they were near a wall. At the apex of the climb, I used a launch character node which would overwrite all velocity in order ot push the cat upwards.

Opening cutscene - I was able to rework the opening cutscene with a quick time event. Previously, the player had only 10 seconds after spawning to find the cat as the parasite. This taught the player that they would die without being inside an animal in earths atmosphere. This felt harsh however, so I proposed a scripted cutscene. In this opening, the cat would slowly investigate Sprite's pod as it opened and Sprite slithered out. The death indicator would quickly close in and the player would be prompted to press 'q' and quickly inhabit the cat. This taught the player to always be inside an animal whilst not allowing them to die so soon.

Quest system - I created a quest system so that the player could be guided to where they need to go. I used a base quest class with each quest being a child of it. I chose this approach as it allowed plenty of customisation for each quest which using premade quest types could not. Quests would be started by either triggers or finishing other quests. The triggers placed in the level would hold references to quest specific actors. For example if a quest existed to soak up a puddle, then the puddle actor would be referenced in the trigger. For quests started by other quests, a data actor would be placed in the level that, when spawned, the new quest could find and retrieve the data it needed. Main quests were included to help Sprite escape but side quests also existed, telling the player to collect all of the 'hue-man artifacts' scattered around the level

UI improvements - Due to a misunderstanding with UE5's user interface, navigation was done manually on each menu. I went through each and every widget and implemented proper navigation as well as some animations which added to the games feel. I also implemented a new journal menu. Previously only showing collectibles, i used a widget switcher to switch between that display and the new display used for tracking quests.

The game was made by Henry Bunn, Max Senior, Robin Crews, Joshua Mahil, Killian Khada and Ewan Burkinshaw

Fonts were used from google fonts