ROLE
Level Designer / Environment Artist
YEAR
2021
GAME ENGINE
GENRE
UNITY
3D top-down shooter
DESCRIPTION
Undead Summer is a single-player 3D top-down shooter and tower defense game, where the player takes the role of a nameless Boy Scout who must fight and build defenses such as turrets and sandbags to survive each level and make it to the safe zone. The game starts in the city area, progresses to the desert and finally the campground.
The player must defend their parents’ RV against waves of zombie enemies while it is refuelling for the next leg of the journey. They can move and shoot to defeat the zombies, but must also build static defenses such as turrets and sandbags nearby in the path of the incoming zombies.
They can build these defenses by spending resources dropped by enemies, or found in the level. Between waves they can gather resources and build new defenses but once the wave starts they must balance shooting the zombies themselves and managing their defenses by repairing turrets that may have been damaged. To succeed in these tasks the player must complete a quick-timed skill challenge such as quickly inputting a correct button sequence or doing a quicktime event. They must survive the level over multiple waves to progress to the next level of the game. If the player dies or the RV is destroyed the game is lost.
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GreyBoxing (Prototype)
Final Build
DESIGN PROCESS
After talking with my teammates, we decided to
come up with 3 levels. The first level takes place in the City(2). I placed the RV truck in the middle of the map. Basically, the whole environment surrounds the RV truck. In my first rough sketches, I planned to zombies come to the middle area using sidewalks between buildings. I wanted to give the impression of zombies coming from the buildings. However, I couldn't use this design decision on the other levels. Nevertheless, I thought, I can mimic this principle by using different types of assets. After finishing the GreyBoxing of the City Level, I started to design the Desert Level(3).
While we were in the Pre-production timespan me and my teammates started to making a brainstorm together. In the beginning, I completely came up with a different idea for my team. I thought we are really going to make a classic turret defense game(1). After a couple of intense conversations, I started to shape the game in my mind. My next goal was to put this idea into the paper. As always in order to start designing, my best strategy is hugging the pen and paper. In order to start a design, pen and paper is the best solution for me. I feel limitless while drawing and it also opens my mind.
For the desert environment, I tried to give the abandoned zone impression such as; old gas station, skulls on the ground, inverted cars, damaged old houses(4), etc... I also draw bridge-like rocks. Because of the top-down camera, I thought directing zombies under the bridge-like assets going to look good. Additionally, while thinking about these ideas at that time, sometimes I turned back to City Level and applied the same idea to one asset. I did this because environmental language between levels should be close to each other. I can't say this for the style but some levels need to contain some sort of same principles so that players can understand the environment more easily while playing the game.
After finishing the desert level,
I started for the last level which is Forest.
Due to the fact that this will be the last level, I
thought this must be way harder than the previous 2 levels. In order to achieve this, I used the forest factor. With the limited light resources and populated trees, it is outstandingly hard to track zombies inside the level. Because of the level design without increasing the health of the zombies or attack damages, we reached the level of difficulty without any struggle.
Rather than the different designs across the levels, I also worked on the Zombie Waves. It was an intense design process to set a balanced game difficulty. I playtested the game several times to reach
desired game balance.
Undead Summer is the first game in which I used Maya just by myself. I know every prop inside the game maybe not look fancy. However, as I said this is the first game that I worked on Maya.
It was an incredible experience for me to use both programs(Unity+Maya) at the same time to create my first game environment. Before jumping to Maya, I draw the City, Desert, and Forest levels inside the AutoCAD. My Architectural background extremely guides me about in-game level measures/dimensions. The only drawback of knowing real-life asset dimensions is converting to cartoonish style. While working on the environmental props for the first time I struggled a little bit. However, thanks to my instructors' wise words, I quickly recovered my tangled brain. With this project, I get familiarized with the cartoonish style dimensions for the first time. Rather than giving increasing or decreasing the measures of assets, I set tried to create a style. For example buildings in City level, the bottom part of the building is narrower than the upper part. The same style effect is also visible for the vehicles, plants, etc.
SCREENSHOTS
