An Unreal Engine 5 puzzle-adventure capstone game about restoring music, color, and life to a sleeping island.
Crustacean Works | Purdue University Fort Wayne Senior Capstone | 2025-2026
| Category | Details |
|---|---|
| Recognition | Recognized as PFW's best capstone project |
| Time period | 2025-2026, 32-week two-semester PFW senior capstone |
| Scale | 1,700+ logged team hours across engineering, design, art, sound, testing, and production |
| Engine | Unreal Engine 5, Blueprint-heavy gameplay systems |
| My role | Project Manager and Technical Lead |
| Public build | Windows installer served through a project website backed by Google Cloud CI/CD |
The production game lived in Perforce because the real project contained large Unreal Engine binaries, Blueprint assets, paid/third-party content, and nearly 100 GB of supporting material. This GitHub repository is the public portfolio version: a curated showcase built for recruiters and hiring managers who want to understand the project, my technical ownership, and the scale of the team effort without cloning a massive game depot.
Island Song was created by Crustacean Works for the Purdue University Fort Wayne Department of Computer Science capstone sequence.
Steven LaGoy - Team Lead
Zachary McGill - Project Manager, Technical Lead
Technical leadership and project management. I helped coordinate a 6-person graduate capstone team, planned sprints, managed scope, and kept the project moving from early concept through final presentation and playable release.
Perforce infrastructure. I preserved Perforce as the right version-control path for Unreal after evaluating more expensive managed and cloud-hosted options, then designed and maintained the self-hosted setup under network, hardware, and team-experience constraints.
Unreal gameplay systems. I contributed to Blueprint-driven game logic, world partitioning, input standards, optimization work, bug fixing, and the color restoration mechanic that tied the game's central theme to player progress.
Distribution. I created the Windows installer path and supported the website workflow used to distribute the playable game.
| Area | What mattered |
|---|---|
| Color restoration system | Reusable restoration scenes radiating from 3D points, with animated radius behavior and spatial bounding. |
| Perforce infrastructure | Self-hosted P4/P4V workflow for large Unreal assets, secure remote access, recovery automation, and team onboarding. |
| Technical leadership | Sprint planning, architecture decisions, development workflow, optimization support, and release readiness. |
| Distribution pipeline | Installer and public website workflow for getting the playable build to players and reviewers. |
| Project scale | Timeline, logged hours, tools, testing, final deliverables, and team-wide production scope. |
The public repository includes selected project artifacts that show how the team planned, built, tested, presented, and delivered the game. The original SharePoint archive was much larger; this repo keeps the pieces that are most useful to understand the work without turning GitHub into a raw file dump.
- Project management files - style guide, team policy document, early version-control cost analysis, Jira backlog export, internal test matrix, external playtesting log, and feedback analysis.
- Internal documentation - team-facing documentation for color mechanics, player systems, UI, world/map, music, settings, and puzzle systems.
- Reports - milestone reports from preliminary planning through the Q4 final report.
- Presentation powerpoints - selected milestone decks, including the compressed final presentation.
Island Song is a free-to-play puzzle adventure game with a low-poly art style and an original soundtrack. Players explore the Island of Song as Sebastian, solving music- and sound-based puzzles to bring color back to a world that has fallen asleep.
The final project included:
- A standalone playable Windows build.
- Music-driven puzzle areas themed around instrument families.
- Color restoration mechanics connected to player progress.
- Menus, tutorial flow, save/load, NPC dialogue, cutscenes, collectables, and unlockable doors.
- Internal testing plus external alpha playtesting with 13 participants.
- Final reports, presentations, design docs, time logs, and a polished final package.
The team converted playtesting observations into concrete product changes, including map markers, collision fixes, and puzzle/challenge tuning.
The public Windows installer was distributed through a minimal project website at crustacean.works.
Technical summaries
- Technical leadership - leadership, architecture, delivery responsibilities, and constraints.
- Perforce infrastructure - version-control decision-making, self-hosting, secure access, recovery, and P4V onboarding.
- Color restoration system - the reusable Unreal color-restoration mechanic.
- Distribution pipeline - installer, website, public download, and CI/CD summary.
- Project scale - timeline, logged hours, tools, testing, and deliverables.
Curated artifacts
- Project management - selected planning, testing, backlog, feedback, and process artifacts.
- Internal documentation - team-facing design and system documentation.
- Reports - milestone reports.
- Presentation powerpoints - polished course presentation decks.