| Project Type | University Team Project |
| Project Role | Programmer |
| Duriation | 10 Months |
Unity
Jira
Confluence
Miro
Trello
Photoshop
Perforce Helix Core
GitHub
GitKreken
Visual Studio
Welcome to Malltopia, build and manage your very own mall, complete with a wide variety of shops and an assortment of decorations to choose from, to make your mall your very own. Design, manage and watch your mall flourish in Malltopia.
Malltopia was developed as part of a year-long game development module during our final year at the University of Portsmouth.
Our team of 11 members consisting of programmers, artists, designers, producers and sound engineers, were tasked by a real client at Frontier Developments, to create a sandbox-style game similar to their 'Planet' franchise of games.
Malltopia was featured at the University of Portsmouth’s booth at EGX 2023, featuring a playable demo for attendees to experience.
Malltopia won the Creative Assembly Best Student Game at the
TIGA UK games education awards 2023, compeating agestinst a short list
totaling 13 nominations.
During the start of the development of this project, the team was divided between two ideas, a mall tycoon building and management game or a pirate-themed island city-builder. This resulted in the development of two teams to produce a vertical slice prototype of each idea, with team members allocated to projects not of their initial preference. This landed me on the pirate team to develop the core systems required to produce a vertical slice for the client.
After 3 months of development, both prototypes were shown to the client, with both garnering largely positive feedback but was ultimately deemed that the mall tycoon game would be a better choice due to its more manageable scope in producing a finished and polished game within the 4 months of remaining development time.
Transitioning to the development of Malltopia, the goal shifted primarily to horizontal development — polishing and adding additional content to produce a playable demo. I was primary responsible with developing and refining UI features, before the final stretch of polishing before the end of development.
Context Menu UI
The game required a system for viewing information and manipulating objects in the world, with the goal to develop a clean and intuitive user-interfacing system, as well as to allow for easy implementation for any object for any future needs. Three menus exist: Customer, Rooms and Furniture menus. Through collaborating with designers, we opted for a design style influenced by the Planet franchise of games.
Edit Menu UI
The edit menu allows the player to purchase new furniture for the selected shop, as well as customizing the walls and floors of the shop. Taking advantage of Unity’s Scriptable objects, it allowed for a simple pipeline for new assets to be implemented, maintain organizational efficiency in our file structure, as well as allow designers the flexibility to easily alter variables of each item. Each list is updated automatically upon any changes or additions, maintaining the efficient workflow of the project.
ToolTip
The tooltip system was designed to be a quick and straightforward method of integrating UI tooltips, allowing designers and other developers to easily add to elements they're reworking on, all while maintaining the project's quick and simple workflow.
Camera Controller
The camera controller has been designed with accommodating different control methods other than just mouse and keyboard, such as controller and touch interfaces, as we were considering the potential of targeting other platforms at this point in development. This prompted me to design this system with anticipation of different control methods, taking inspiration from similar pre-existing games from different platforms and creating a world-point orbiting controller. Along with inclusion of customizable variables allows for flexibility as well as simplifying integration of additional control methods.
Construction System
The construction system for the pirate project is primitive as it was required to be completed in a timely manner in order to achieve a playable proof of concept for the client pitch deadline, but was designed to be modular and expandable to future proof it should the pirate project be chosen. The system allows for the rotation and placement of selected building and allowed for easy inclusion of new buildings via Unity’s scriptable objects.
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