When we settled on the idea for a claw machine based game, we had a lot of plans and ideas that eventually wouldn't make the final cut. Some never got out of prototyping and some were removed a week before release.

I used a dual control framework to determine which features and mechanics could work.

The dual control framework, how I used it, works by splitting a game in 2 control blocks; What does the player control? What does the game control?

Knowing the relationship between these blocks and how they communicate internally with each other allowed me create an economy of time and damage where the players can trade in actions to communicate with the game's control block.

This then allowed me to create a balance sheet where you look at a theoretical situation of a base health-pool taking continuous damage from the lowest damage source and taking that as a baseline for your games perceived speed.

By playing with these numbers you can make a game appear to be faster, even when it's not.

This is important when you look at an arcade claw and you compare it to the game we made, I wanted to ensure that same experience was felt without any unfair advantages since it is a pvp game.

If you were to ask me if our team had a sound designer, I would say no, because nobody on our team was specialized in it.

However, in response to that, the sound design teachers proclaimed me an honorary sound designer now.

So a big thanks to my friends in that course for pointing me towards the right software and libraries.

I had very little experience in this area going into it, going out of it however I learned a lot...

I Used a bunch of free assets from online libraries, transformed them in audacity and randomized them in unreal using sound cues.

The main part im proud of is the music, I editing a track multiple times with slight iterations to act as static and damage as the game progresses, adding to the environment of the game. I created a new dataclass and managed to blend the audio tracks together in unreal while exporting each seperately, this way I can edit them individually and add more if needed.