Szymon Szymanski
Technical Games Designer
I'm Szymon, I have just finished my 3rd year of the gameplay design and production course at the university of Staffordshire. During my years at Staffordshire I have developed a passion for games design more specifically the technical side of it. I really enjoy using UE5 blueprints to create games and I'm learning C++ to hopefully take my skills even further.
Bug Tower Defence: Prototyping for technical designers
Project Details
Genre: 2D Tower Defence
Platform: PC
Duration: December 10th (2024) - February 18th (2025)
Team Size: 1
Engine and tools used: Unreal Engine 5.4 Blueprints
Bug Tower Defence is a 2D top down tower defence demo level made in Unreal Engine 5. It has your standard tower defence mechanics such as waves, enemies, towers etc. with a few extra ones like abilities and destroyable objects. This game was made for one of my 3rd year modules, prototyping for technical designers, we were given a choice of briefs (see image below for my choice) and told to create a game using it, this is what I created.
Showreel video
Technical design document Link - BugTowerDefenceTDD
Szymon's City Builder Tutorial:
Final Year Project
Project Details
Genre: City Builder
Platform: PC
Duration: October 29th (2024) - February 25th (2025)
Team Size: 1
Engine and tools used: Unreal Engine 5.4 Blueprints
Szymon's city builder tutorial is a tutorial level of a city builder game created in UE5 using blueprints. The purpose of this project is to introduce players who are new to city builder games into the city builder genre, this level was created for my final 3rd year project and is a solution to a problem which I had to find within the games industry. My problem was:
"City builder games can feel intimidating because of the complexity they usually have, the player is put straight into the game then bombarded with information all at once without a thorough tutorial. A lot of city builders are meant to be played as infinite sandboxes so the developers don't put much effort into explaining anything to the players and hope they figure it out themselves which can cause some players to lose interest. This project will focus on the users experience by providing them a tutorial level of a city builder with a step-by-step guide on how everything works, this will hopefully lead to the player having a better understanding of the basics of city builders."
Showreel video
Link to presentation which shows my development process - CityBuilderTutorialLevelFinalPresentation
Hospital Breakout: First C++ project
Project Details
Genre: First Person Shooter
Platform: PC
Duration: March 1st (2024) - May 13th (2025)
Team Size: 1
Engine and tools used: Unreal Engine 5.4 C++ with minor elements created in blueprint
Hospital Breakout is a first person zombie shooter game created in UE5 using C++ and some blueprint. All main features such as the enemy AI, Weapons system etc. was created in C++ with the addition of blueprints for things like visual effects and animations.
This was my first time properly using C++ and it has inspired me to put time into learning it as I feel like it is a very useful tool and has many benefits to it that UE5 blueprint doesn't. At the start of this project I had no experience with C++ and I was going in blind however due to my knowledge of Blueprint and UE5 I was able to overcome all the challenges C++ presented me with as I was able to use that knowledge within C++ so it didn't take me long to learn the basics. I found that I was able to translate blueprint into C++ which helped me a lot and really sparked my interest in programming.