Skybooter (2026)

Team Bungiecords (MSU Collaborative Class Project, built with UE5)

Roles: Technical Designer, UI Programmer, Level Designer

Dev Synopsis

Skybooter was developed by a team of 16 students as a part of MSU's Collaborative Game Design capstone course.

I was very happy to bring my knowledge of UE5 and technical design to this exciting, innovative project. Developed between January and May of 2026, the final product consisted of a working vertical slice.

My role was technical designer, UI programmer, and level designer.

Programming

Design

My programming on this project was mostly done inside blueprints, crafting interactable gameplay systems on both a large and small scale. I ensured all systems were intuitive for other designers to implement and use.

One system I built was the cannon system. In the game, you can climb inside a cannon, aim, and fire yourself out of it to reach other floating pirate ships. This was done entirely within blueprints. I worked closely with our programming lead to ensure that my blueprints worked seamlessly with the character controller and other systems.

The cannon system used a projectile prediction calculation to find the velocity to launch the player. That same calculation was used to propagate points along a spline mesh to visually represent the launch trajectory. The color of the visual trajectory line would change depending on if it detected a hit, helping players better plan their launches.

There are breakable walls around the map, that can be destroyed with bombs or by exploding barrels. I worked on both of those, diving into Unreal's Chaos Destruction System. It ended up being quite a cool effect, having the wooden walls burst and splinter into pieces upon exploding.

I also handled UI programming, which concerned the settings menu, remappable keys, graphics settings, as well as gameplay interfaces like health bar, damage indicators, and side mission menus. All UI work was done using UE's UMG and blueprint-driven.

My design work on this project was centered around level design and system design and implementation. I covered some of the systems design in the programming section, so I'll focus on the level design here.

At the beginning of the project, each of our team members made a simple level blockout, and we took notes on each others designs. I was chosen to make the final blockout, and used Unreal's CubeGrid tool to make some basic ships. The design evolved over time, and I worked closely with the design lead and other level designer to craft a fun, intuitive level that achieved the goal of guiding the player through the game's mission.

The sky pirate theme allowed for a lot of verticality, particularly with the cannon mobility, so I could play around with having neighboring ships at different altitudes, or ships vertically stacked.

The decks of the ships are populated with various obstacles and structures, including the breakable walls mentioned in the programming section. Our team discussed how we could make gameplay interesting on two scales - large, and small. The large scale is the traversal between ships, like the ship verticality I mentioned and the spacing between ships. On a small scale, we still wanted the decks of the ships to be engaging, so each ship is designed differently, with a different floor plan and different deck elevations at different points. This forces the player to use their mobility tools, like their weapons that give them special movement abilities, to reach areas otherwise unreachable.