Description

Fastival is an arcade racing game where players speed through different attractions within a vibrant and cartoony carnival throughout each race. Knock down targets as you race to trigger unique effects on the track that you can use to your advantage. Collect wacky items that can be used to mess with other racers to enhance your driving capabilities.

Contributions

Built the entire UI system from scratch in Unreal UMG, including Settings, Tutorial, HUD, Pause, and Result screens.
Developed a custom Enhanced Input–based index navigation system, supporting seamless keyboard/mouse and gamepad control with focus gating and controller ownership checks.
Designed the overall menu flow, handling transitions across multi-level menus for intuitive navigation.
Collaborated with gameplay engineers to integrate lap counters, ranking display, and item usage UI, ensuring a smooth and consistent racing experience.

Team Retrospective

What Went Right

Honing in on one specific mechanic and finding the fun
Items are usable and impactful to the race
The majority of disputes were handled with clarification throughout the project
The iterative process resulted in distinct and beautiful levels
The game landed with the target audience
The team handled adversity very well

What Went Wrong

Restructuring the menu at Alpha
Random pushes and unstable builds right before milestones
Accountability rituals weren't effective and adhered to
QA testing was taken on by too few people and introduced late in the production
Not enough buy-in at all stages of development
Lack of automatic version control number when making builds
Checking in code without much testing and changes not being communicated to all people who should know
Documentation not consistently updated

Even Better If

Programmers and artists collaborate on Menus from the jump
Establish designers-artists and designers-programmers pipeline standards as early as possible
Adoption of staggered locks, which were adhered to so we could properly regress bugs, early and better understanding of dependencies
Greater emphasis on team norms early in development and more commitment to them
Better feedback loop when bugs are fixed
Set automatic version numbering up early in development
Performance is tracked from the beginning so that identifying things that are making the game slow is easier
Respect and appreciate each other

Google Sites

Report abuse