My Contributions:

• Wave Spawning System

  • 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.

• Weapons Systems:

• Creation of three new enemy types: (Exploader, Jumper, and Puddler)

  • 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.

• Swampy Land- Level Section

  • When I was tasked to make a map I knew I wanted to provide the players with a memorable experience, while maintaining the subtle circular map design that players find in similar games of the genre.

  • This lead to the creation of Swampy Land, which was a portion of the map that was a theme park inspired by the swamps of Florida.

• 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.

• 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.

• Game Balance and Player Scaling

  • I worked closely with the Ability Designer of the game to balance the game to encourage Players to interact with both their guns and the abilities without growing frustrated.

  • We would watch closely throughout playtests and make adjustments to enemy health, weapon damage, and ability damage depending upon if players were interacting with both guns and abilities, and if players were not feeling challenged.