CritterEats

Project informations

  • For course: game creation
  • Engine: Unreal Engine C++
  • Teammates: Tamara Antoun, Lauriane Bouchard, Maxim Boudreau, Laurianne Chasse, Guillaume Cloutier, Lorik Gauthier, Maggie Li, Emily Paulet, Tristant St-Arnaud, Emmanuelle Tremblay, Axel Bureau, Tianchle Chen, Adam Maps, Yanis Reynaud, Victor Vieux-Melchior
  • Project date: March 17 2025 – December 12 2025
  • Project URL: itch.io/crittereats

Deliver food as a skunk in the sewers—fast, careful, and smelly.

A cozy, low poly sewer world soft lights, tiny details, and a bittersweet charm. Beneath the grime, a quiet warmth follows a skunk on a gentle, redemptive path.

Tasks

Spawn Points

I created Spawn Points, simple actors with a static mesh and no collisions, placed in the scene by the level designer. These points determine where deliveries appear. The Spawn Manager selects a point from a subset of the list to spawn each delivery, avoiding overuse of the same locations.

Spawn Manager

The Spawn Manager handles all delivery spawning. At the start of the game, it collects all Spawn Points in the scene and randomly chooses one from half of the available points. When a player reaches a delivery or a timer expires, a new delivery spawns at a different point. The manager also tracks the player’s score, adding or subtracting points depending on delivery success or failure.

Deliveries

Deliveries appear at a Spawn Point chosen by the Spawn Manager. When collected by the player, they disappear. Each delivery has a timer; if not collected in time, it despawns. Deliveries are also linked to a Waypoint, which indicates their position on the screen and helps the player locate them.

Waypoints

I developed an Actor Component to manage waypoints. It checks if the player can see the delivery directly. If it goes off-screen, an indicator appears, showing the direction of the delivery and the remaining time. The indicator dynamically updates according to the delivery’s position in the world.

TutoSteps

TutoSteps are simple actors used to mark the player’s position in the tutorial and trigger progression based on their index.

Tutorial Deliveries

Deliveries in the tutorial behave differently: if the timer expires, they respawn at the same location to prevent blocking player progression.

Boss

The boss has a structured dialogue system based on multiple arrays of strings: two for the tutorial, one in the hub after level 1, and one in level 2. Each line appears in the UI and progresses only when the player presses the A button on the controller. The logic is intentionally simple and reliable, advancing line by line manually.

Hub

In the hub, I reused the same narrative logic as in the tutorial. Once a sequence finishes, it does not repeat unless the player quits and restarts the game.

Time-Limited Deliveries & Progress Feedback

To add challenge, I implemented a time-based delivery mechanic. Each delivery contributes to the player’s progress when collected and disappears if not picked up in time, encouraging quick action. Progress bars update in real time, giving clear feedback and enhancing pacing.

Collision Bug Fix

During testing, I fixed a bug where spawn point collisions interfered with gameplay. Disabling these collisions ensured delivery spawning and player movement were no longer blocked.