Weapons Design:

• I designed each weapon to be unique, and powerful in their own right.

  • The shotgun offered players high damage and a wide spread to hit enemies at the cost of fire rate

  • The SMG offered a high fire rate to burst down individual enemies at the cost of needing more ammo

• Weapons were made easily balanced around encouraging the players to use a mix of guns and abilities, and find a sweet spot between enemies being too tanky/squishy

Wave Progression:

• I built a wave spawning system that would grow in difficulty as the player completed rounds.

• Enemies would grow in number, variety, and strength with each good round.

• The thought process behind this system:

  • As players interact with the game they will grow in resources, skill, and confidence. This can lead to them no longer feeling challenged and thus losing the fun.

  • The rounds growing in difficulty challenge the players progression, and makes sure they must actively think about how they participate with the games systems.

Enemy Design:

• When I was asked to assist with expanding the enemy types the game currently included: Walkers, Runners, Gassers, and a Boss.

• The problem we were running into was players did not have to actively think about when to shoot and could keep their gun at head level to always be able to shoot enemies.

• I addressed this by creating three new enemy types

  • The Exploader: This enemy type crawls at the speed of a walker. This gets the player moving their cursor up and down adding to their challenge as they must now watch out for enemies on the lower half of their screen. This enemy also explodes doing damage to the player or other enemies. This encourages the player to think about whether or not to shoot the enemy as it could damage themself or be more beneficial to shoot the enemy damaging a group of enemies.

  • The Jumper: The Jumper is an enemy that runs at the player and occasionally launches themself through the air to get closer to the player. This gets the player watching out for enemies on the top half of the screen and watching out for enemies that do a better job of keeping up with them than the runners do. Players also are challenged as its harder to shoot the enemy as it move through the sky than on the ground. This encourages the player to actively think about their own skillset when engaging with this enemy.

  • The Puddler: The Puddler is an enemy that transitions between standing and crawling. While standing the enemy moves at walking running speed, and while in puddle form the enemy moves even faster. This enemy will only go into standing mode when next to the player. This enemy while achieving the same for getting the player to look down for enemies, continues to challenge them as the Puddler is much smaller and faster. This leads to the player needing to practice their aim or risk getting hit when the Puddler closes the distance.

Documentation:

• Management of Game Design Document

  • Beginning the project I put together a template for our team to write a GDD for us to follow throughout the entirety of our project.

  • Before beginning work on the game we as a team sat down and wrote the comprehensive list of features, ideas, and feelings for the game.

  • As the project continued to progress I handled updates to the GDD and during meetings aided in sticking us to the original pillars laid out in our GDD.

• Documentation of Player Feedback

  • As we would receive feedback I would document what the players feelings were and the systems/sections of the game it pertained to.

  • We would sit down as a team following receiving user feedback and make decisions based upon this feedback, as well as how the feedback related to the sections that were actively being worked on.