Drone FPS
Drone FPS is a basic first-person shooter with interesting shrinking and health mechanics. I worked as the combat and systems designer and a part of the level design. Drone FPS was a two-week team project I completed while at university. We were given a random genre and were required to create a full level with at least three newly introduced mechanics. It was completed in Unreal Engine 5 with a team of 4.
The following are my contributions:
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Player Side Combat Design
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Main Rifle scripting and animation
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Grenade function and throwing
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Receiving damage and death
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Systems Design
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Interactable pickups (ammo, health packs, and grenades) and inventory
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Level systems (enemy activation and progression activation)
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Light Pipe creation system.
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Level Design
Light Pipes
Creating these "Light Pipes" as shown on the right was one of the things that inspired me to be a systems designer. During testing our players would put batteries into these receptacles to open doors, but then would never notice the door was open. So we created these little emitter balls with a light tube between them to guide the player. The inspiration I mentioned came after I watched one of my teammates place these in the level, painfully resize, and rotate the tubes to fit perfectly, just for us to remake the room an hour later. I then spent that night creating a script that allowed you to select a starting emitter and an ending emitter, and then have the light tube automatically set itself between them, It streamlined the work for everyone and I was very proud and excited to do more like it. It then led me to create small systems for almost every interaction in that project.
Solo Changes
After turning in this very buggy project I felt it was somewhat unfinished. So with the permission of my Team, I returned to the project with lots of fixes and some changes to the mechanic introduction. The biggest bugs I found were collision and enemy pathing, the difficulty scale of the game also needed lots of tweaking.
These bugs were minor, but combined they made all combat trivial and extremely cheatable. My main focus in reworking was to fix this feeling and make the game as fun as possible. I overhauled the level to fix mixing collisions and improve immersion. I fixed the pathing issue by giving the drones more range, fire rate, and height while reducing how much they can move. This turned the game into more of a movement shooter involving dodging projectiles. This change made sense because the game already included a jetpack.
The last change I made was to add more pickup and resources scattered around the level, This helped encourage exploration and increased movement during combat. This gave the game a much more finished feel and allowed for a much more fun run through the level.
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