(December 2017 – April 2018)
Made of Metal is a fast-paced First-Person Shooter where players fight through multiple enemy types while having to keep constant movement to avoid taking damage. The game was originally a Top-Down Bullet Hell, but through iterations of what the game was, we decided to transform it into a First-Person Shooter and try our luck with the new design direction.
Contribution: For this specific project, I was a Combat Designer and Systems Designer. During the entirety of the project, I was in charge of making sure that our Weapon System and any other combat-related systems were working properly. These Systems were mostly related to the Weapon System and the Pick-up System. Throughout the entirety of the project, I made sure that most of our designs were reusable in nature, making the working environment a more streamlined process. This allowed to implement new designs and features at a faster rate than we were doing initially. One of these many tools was the Saving System for our game. Since the game saved an array of variables in the form of a Data Structure for each individual level, we were able to add new needed variables to the Save Files by simply adding a new variable in the Data Structure and connecting it to one node in the Game Mode.
To get into more detail about the Weapon System I implemented, the character’s weapon is an Actor Component that is native to the Main Character Class. The weapons are all stored in a Data Table that uses a Weapon Structure (Data Structure) to record different variables in each row. The reasoning behind this, was to make the development and balancing of weapons much faster and efficient. It became very easy to make changes to the weapons when you can change any variable of it in one place. This also meant that other designers that were not very familiar with the Weapon System could create their own weapon/upgrades for the player and the enemies. Out original intention was to bring satisfying combat into the game with a wide variety of Weapon Types. For this reason, I developed the extent of weapons we had, which included:
Pistol (Single Fire)
Machine Gun (Automatic)
Shotgun
Burst Rifle (Burst)
Grenade Launcher
Sniper
Railgun
With this also came up the Pick-up System. The way the weapons were set-up with the Data Table, allowed me to create a Base Pickup that worked as a Scriptable Object; what made each pick-up different was a simple Name variable that would call the Name of the Row and input it for the Actor Component.
Reflection: Due to my work on Systems, specifically the Modular Weapons System and the Modular Pick-up System, I have been pushing myself to make all of my implementations as streamlined and reusable as possible. I strive to make tools and designs that other designers can exploit to their full potential, without the need of the original designer to help them understand it. This makes up for a better System overall, allowing myself to become a much better Systems Designer. If the System is functional, balanced, and easy to develop/modify, then I consider it a success.