Heady Stuff: Agile Development Practices in Unreal Engine Game Development

This paper will demonstrate that the Agile development process helps to ensure incremental work on an Unreal Engine game project is achieved by presenting a product produced in Unreal Engine along with my experience in utilizing Scrum to facilitate the game’s development. Section 2 discusses project goals and motivations for using Agile, using Unreal Engine, and for the choice of genre in the final product. Section 3 contextualizes these goals by presenting the history of Unreal Engine, the novel applications of Unreal Engine, and the use of Unreal Engine in the development of Heady Stuff. Section 4 presents findings from the project’s development by describing my use of Agile and by presenting the steps taken in learning Unreal Engine. Section 4 continues by highlighting important development considerations in the use of Blueprints, C++, and HLSL in Unreal Engine. The section ends with the presentation of project feedback, its incorporation in the final product, and the resources used to assist development. Section 5 compares the workflow, help resources, and applications of Unreal Engine with those of Unity, another highly popular game engine. Lastly, Section 6 performs a post-mortem on the overall development process by considering how well Agile development processes were upheld along with how much of the original plans in the Design Document was present in the final product. Additionally, the section presents the major challenges encountered during project development. These challenges will help in proposing possible best practices for game development in Unreal Engine.