Shred Off

Role

Gameplay Programmer

Engine

Unreal Engine 5 (C++)

Duration

16 Weeks

Team Size

11 Developers

This project was made as a part of a graded assignment during my 3rd year of education at BUas.

3rd person shooter / snowboarding game where you race against time to clear the level of enemies and score points. For this project I worked on gameplay - combat and weapons and the tutorial. I have also created heatmaps to help our our designers with the overall balanced of the game. This project was published on steam.

Personal Focus & Contributions

One of the main obstacles, my team has encountered while developing the game, was how to combine fast paced movement and 3rd person shooter combat. In the game the player is expected to navigate the terrain, perform snowboarding tricks and shoot enemies all at the same time. To tackle this problem I worked on making combat more accessible, for example: the game automatically locks onto an enemy based on their preferred 'auto-aim' strength this allows players to focus more on the movement and target prioritization (target is selected based on several parameters and weights such as World Distance, On Screen Distance, Current Health and more).

The weapons in the game we also designed with this in mind - we opted in for either hit-scan weapons or weapons with homing projectiles.

To make tricks fit into combat, I have added a parry window with i-frames - do the trick at the right time and the enemy bullet will be reflected back onto to them.

Another problem we discovered during playtests was that because of a somewhat unique gameplay players were struggling a lot with controls. To make the game more accessible I collaborated with designers to create an onboarding level. For this level, I worked on a Mission System that would guide players and teach them about how to control their character and most important gameplay mechanics.

Players will receive a new mission upon completing their current mission, missions involve different scripted events (spawning enemies or items, scripted gameplay section with button prompts etc.). Player can also easily navigate the tutorial by skipping, replaying or going back to a previous step.

During earlier stages of the project; I have created heatmaps with the same goal. Initially the game was supposed to have bigger open levels. To help designers make more informed decisions on the level design and balance of the game, I added heatmaps. The game would connect to the database I set up and submit the data we were interested in. The data was then retrieved from the SQL database and used to built heatmaps. Heatmaps collected information such as: paths taken, damage received and death location. They also showed which weapons or actors caused most deaths or dealt the most damage.

Combat and Weapons

Tutorial and Onboarding

Publishing on steam

Shred Off was an important milestone for me because it was the first project I have worked on that was published on steam and that anybody could access and review. It taught me that game development does not end at release and how important post-launch patches and updates and responding to player feedback is. Code reviews, thorough internal testing and CI helped us deliver stable post launch updates.

Chain lighting weapon and deflect.