Panic Buy

During my second year 'Group Project' module, I worked with a group containing other students from the programming, art and design courses. We were tasked with creating a 3D game that was designed to run on a PS3.

We decided to create a game based on the 'Panic Buy' phenomenon that was occurring at the time due to the beginnings of the pandemic. This was an attempt to make light of the situation and be a distraction. The game tasked players with rushing around a shop in order to find the items on the list and checkout before the timer hit zero.

1/5

During the project, I ended up being the only programmer and thus the entirety of the functionality was expected to be created by me. This significantly cut down the amount of content we could realistically include within the game and I did my best to polish the features we did add to make up for this.

The game featured purposefully slightly broken physics similar to games like 'Amazing Frog?' and 'Goat Simulator'. One of the biggest challenges I faced with this project was quelling the physics engine enough to make the game playable without taking away from the purposeful brokenness of the game. Being a beginner to Unreal and Blueprints, I was not sure how to do this efficiently and the method I ended up using still wasn't completely fool-proof.

The module required us to share our game with other students at set times to get feedback for the game in order to improve and get the best outcome we could at the time of submission. During the sessions where we shared our game, we got overwhelmingly positive reviews.

Even when people were purposefully breaking the game to see what would happen they said it was fun. This is one of the things I am proud of in this project, as I feel that this is the most important part of creating an interactive experience such as a game.