Alone in the Machine
About: Developed for the “MechJam III” game jam, the main theme revolved around, you guessed it, giant mechs!
Our team also had a fascination for dark, survival-horror games as well so we just simply decided to make a game like that.
I honestly had a lot of fun working on this project, as I got to use more of the terrain tools that I like to utilize when making a level! Tile-mapping is nice and all but I really enjoy painting landscapes and the like manually.
For this project, I also gained a lot of “adaptive” experience when we lost our only artist due to technical difficulties. I had to really get creative and make due with the assets that he had already provided, and make interesting and unique areas with them.
What I’m most proud of here is how I managed to make environments stand out and be recognizable despite being in complete and total darkness the entire time.
It wasn’t easy, but I decided that each area had to have visible landmarks to make them identifiable and memorable for players to find their way around the map.
Project Breakdown:
- Genre: 3D Top-Down, Survival Shooter
- Engine: Unity
- Team Size: 4
- Duration: 14 days
- Platform: PC
Design Process
Normally I’ve designed maps through Figma but for a project like this I needed to be able to easily make more natural curves and shapes to the map I was designing. For this draft I designed it in a photoshop-like program called “Pixlr” and used a combination of basic shapes to make the rough outline of the map as well as the individual icons designating where everything was going to be placed!
This here is the final result, and the full overhead view of the map! Quite a bit had to be changed here and there during production but the main ideas for the individual areas still stayed the same. The most notable changes were locations of the resources, enemy spawners, and the resupply/repair stations. Those were adjusted during playtesting to better aid with game-flow and area balancing.
Crash Landed:
Players have a primary objective when they load up the game. Simply put: find the necessary ship parts in order to exit the hostile planet safely. There are two main pieces to collect for the ship, the thruster and a wing, but there’s also a certain amount of scrap that players will need to collect while exploring in order to repair the rest of the ship’s damages! Be warned though, each piece and part will be no easy task to collect with enemies patrolling about and guarding them.
I had a lot of different ideas when it came to designing where to place the key items for players to find, in addition to the scrap they’d need to get the ship fixed. I thought about having a visual indicator about where the pieces were, but I instead decided on making things a bit more challenging and with a stronger emphasis on player exploration. I decided that in order to find the parts needed to completely the game, players would have to explore on their own with zero guidance from the game.
Enemies Abound:
While navigating the environment there’s plenty of creatures that lurk in the darkness, waiting for unsuspecting players to encroach on their territory. There’s two main types of enemies. One of them is a bioluminescent monstrosity that will chase the player down and is normally seen with others of its kind. The other, is an enemy mech completely taken over by corruption and will attack the player if they get too close! Sometimes players will have to be stealthy and careful in order to avoid these dangerous monstrosities.
In the early days of the project development pipeline, I loved seeing the designs of the monsters and planning out how they’d function. We had more in mind, but our hands were tied with only being able to have two in the game. One would be something that would continuously spawn in from a creature spawner, while the other would be at fixed areas and be motionless until the player got to close to it.
Manage Resources:
A big piece of game design here is resource management and making sure players are staying up to date on everything. Players have to not only manage ammunition, but also make sure their weapons aren’t busted, their mechs aren’t inhibited, and even making sure they have enough time to complete the mission! There’s plenty of resource caches around, but not every supply of resources is safe and sound.
When it came to placing resources, that was the easy part. For a good few of them, I could scatter a few across the map without having to be overly thoughtful of where they ended up. This went double for the tinier sources of scrap. However, when it came to the bigger sources of scrap I had to be very mindful of where those would be located. After all, scrap was a huge resource to be had in this game because of how incredibly useful it was.