About Candy Craving
Candy Craving is a 2.5D puzzle game where your goal is to eat all the cute little candies.
Lechomp is hungry... and these candies running around look mighty appetizing.
Solve puzzles to trap the candies and devour them.
Cute Monster
In Candy Craving you play as Lechomp, an adorable monster who goes crazy for sweets of all kinds! Use his ability to both eat and regurgitate candies to solve puzzles!
Candy Factory Puzzles
The candy factory you find yourself in is filled with all kinds of crazy candies and contraptions! learn about all the various candy types and use them to catch those pesky running candy corn.
Engine
Unreal Engine
Team Size
15 People
Genre
Third Person Puzzle
Development Time
~8 weeks
Technical Design
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Designed and blueprinted the 2.5D on-rail camera system for our project.
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Set up the animation blueprint and handled animation integration for the project.
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Handled the technical creation and implementation of various Niagara VFX
Production
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Shared the producer role with a fellow student
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Led the majority of team meetings
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Handled the team's Scrum responsibilities.
On-Rail Camera
On-Rail Camera Design
The on-rail camera consists of 2 separate blueprints:
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BP_CameraRail
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BP_Camera
BP_CameraRail is quite simple as it is just a spline to which the camera attaches itself and moves along. The really interesting part is in BP_Camera where the logic for tracking and following the player is executed (visualized below on blueprint.ue)
Creating VFX
For our project, I worked together with VAs on 3 visual effects:
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A candy glow effect for pickups.
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A toon-like cloud volumetric effect to obscure player transformation.
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A trailing effect on the player character when running.
I mainly worked on the technical side of these effects, creating and implementing these effects using Niagara and blueprints.
Working in close collaboration with Visual Artists I am very happy with how the end results looked, and in the process learned more about Niagara, Materials, and animation-based VFX.
Production Work
About
Project Responsibilities
About the On-Rail Camera
For our game, I created a 2.5D on-rail camera that would follow the player with a slight delay. I believed this would add a bit more interaction compared to a static camera directly attached to the player character.
For our project, there were a few requirements that I had to follow:
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The camera had to be able to show the entirety of the puzzle.
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The camera should be generally close to the player in order to both show off the art as well as to not lose track of various smaller game elements.
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The camera had to be able to both turn as well as move further into the level for further level creation.
Being both a technical designer as well as a producer on this project meant I had to balance both jobs in equal amounts, which is why I did not have as many iterations of this camera as I would have liked.
MISC
Niagara VFX
My Experience as a Producer
Throughout the duration of this project, I took up split responsibility for our team's production, as we did not have a dedicated producer on our team.
I worked on the creation of our project scrum board, handled burndown charts for our team, reviewed work for my peers, created user stories, and handled stakeholder communication through weekly reports.
I also did alot of work on QA for our team to ensure build quality and kept our bug report document up to date.
I'm confident in saying I'm a good speaker, and as such led most team discussions, keeping people to the point and giving everyone an equal opportunity to speak their thoughts.
Around halfway through the project, I stepped back a little further from production to focus more on technical design as that is where my interest lies.
Play The Game!
Additional work
Outside of my assigned work, I helped out my team with various miscellaneous tasks, including the following:
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Facilitated interdisciplinary communication
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Organized a team bonding experience by going bowling with our team.
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Set up an animation blueprint for our main character together with animators.
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Color-coded pressure plates and doors, linking them together by color.
