Overview
Fishing Minigame: The Game was created as an academic project. The goal of the game is to catch more fish than your opponent across several rounds of gameplay. Between rounds, you can buy upgrades using points earned by catching fish. I worked in a team of 3 with the objective of creating a multiplayer game that can be played over a local network. The project was built using Blueprints in Unreal Engine 5. Development is ongoing, including regular UX Testing to iteratively improve the experience.
My Areas of Focus
- Exposure to the Blueprints system and familiarization with the types of nodes and best practices
- Project Management, ensuring that the scope of the project made sense and deliverables were timely and valuable
- Designing and implementing the core gameplay loop and functionality
- Ongoing iterative improvements driven by UX testing feedback
- Maintaining a fun, engaging, and coherent experience during client and server communication
What I Learned
This was both my first exposure to Unreal and my first exposure to Blueprints. There was some initial discomfort getting used to node-based programming in Blueprints, but eventually I started to notice recurring nodes and patterns and got used to formatting my code in a different way. This was also my first multiplayer game that was intended to be played across a network rather than on the same device. We had to refactor a lot of core logic with intentionality around whether things lived client side or server side, and some of these discrepancies caused some strange gameplay bugs and latency that we had to address.
Current State
The project exists as a playable two-player prototype with stable local multiplayer support and a complete core gameplay loop. This project is slated to be released as a publicly available game on Steam in Summer 2026. A Steam page link will be added below when this happens.