Cole Williams - Level Design and System Design
Prisoner of the Undead
Prisoner of the Undead is a 3D First Person Shooter game that I solo created in Unity for my Building Game Worlds: Level Design, Mods, and Quality Assurance class at Montgomery College. The game is about a prisoner of war who manages to get out of their restraints only to realize the enemies who captured him have been turned into zombies.
Project Info:
Course: Tech 290
School: Montgomery College
Team Name: N/A
My Roles:
Solo creator using Unity Asset store art assets
Level Design
My level design work on Prisoner of the Undead included:
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Level creation​
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Encounter design
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Item placement
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Lighting
Level Creation
For Prisoner of the Undead I wanted the map to feel like an established military base that had been overrun by zombies. I wanted the player to feel like they were in a rush, or panic, to find their way out and so I added long dark hallways to make it easier to get lost. I wanted players to feel as though they need to actively keep track of where they are. The player needs to find keycards around the map in order to progress through the game. There are three doors of different colors requiring matching colored keycards to open them. Doing this encourages the player to search the map further than finding the quickest route which in turn leads to them coming into more encounters with enemies.
Early design of map
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Encounter Design
I created rooms that resemble a mess hall, barracks, bathing area and more to make the location of zombie groups seem more logical. While the player roams the hallways, they will encounter enemies that are also roaming the hallways and detect the player based on a certain distance. By having an abundance of enemies within rooms and sporadic enemies in the hallways that are harder to see due to the atmosphere, there are two different forms of encounters with enemies throughout the level. The rooms also act as landmarks to help the player keep track of where they are around the level. This was also the first game where I used NavMesh for a level to control enemy movement.
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Image of Hallway
Image of Barracks
Item Placement
The items that can be picked up in the game are health packs, ammo crates, keycards, and one new weapon. I tested the health and ammo for the game to the point where health was just plentiful enough to keep the player from dying while also giving enough of a challenge where they can die if they are not careful. Many of the rooms have ammo and health pickups to give more obvious access to these items. When a player enters a lit room, I want them to think, "okay, I'm not safe but I can probably find something useful in here." Ammo seems to be a bit too abundant but I chose to leave it as so due to the lack of other means to defeat enemies. The second weapon can be found in the second area and is a fully automatic rifle. The weapon is optional and unnecessary to complete the game but gives the player an alternative form of fire.
Lighting
I wanted the lighting in the game to cause a feeling of rush and panic for the player. For the hallways of the level, there are constant red pulsing lights to show a sign of emergency. The darkness that consumes the hallways in the time that the pulsing lights are dimming gives the player a harder time figuring out where they are and if there is an enemy near them. This results in more difficulty for the player as intended. In the rooms throughout the level however are fully lit. This helps create a different type of environment and allows the player to provide themselves with a sort of landmark when attempting to navigate the level.
System Design
My system design work on Prisoner of the Undead included:
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Shooting mechanic​
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Ammo system
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Player Health system
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Movement system
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Keycard system
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Enemy combat
Shooting Mechanic
The shooting mechanic in Prisoner of the Undead is something that I plan to go back and rework. The mechanic currently instantiates an object with a velocity at the end of the barrel but the aiming of the projectile is far from perfect. At the time of making the game I was unfamiliar with raycasts and there for I had to eyeball the direction of the projectile to try to get it toward the middle of the screen. Since the time of this project I have learned how to better create a shooting mechanic.
Original Shooting Mechanic
New Raycast Shooing Mechanic
Ammo System
For the ammo system, I created ammo boxes that will add to an ammo count for the player that can be anywhere between a set minimum and maximum range per ammo box. The amount of ammo restored can be anywhere within that range. Looking back I feel as though more playtesting could have been done to solidify the amount of ammo around the map so that it is not as abundant as it is. The counter argument to that however is that there is no melee system or any other form of dealing damage to zombies without ammo so the overabundance of ammo might not be that big of an issue.
Player Health System
The player health system has the player heal through health packs. The maximum player health is 100 and can be reduced by an enemy damaging them. If the player dies they must restart the game entirely. There are no checkpoints in the game.
Keycard System
There are three keycards in the game that I placed within the map that the player is required to collect in order to progress throughout the level. The purpose of the keycards are to limit the player to a certain area so they are forced to explore more of the area before proceeding. The doors that require the keycards will tell the player that the door requires a keycard if they are attempted to be interacted with prior to retrieving the associated keycard.
Enemy Combat
The enemies within the game (zombies) are set to detect the player after the a certain range between them is met. If the player is close enough to an enemy, the enemy will start to chase the player. The enemies move along a NavMesh within the level when moving toward the player. If the player moves far enough away from an enemy chasing them, the enemy will stop following and stay still. The player can kill an enemy in one shot. The enemies attack the player by colliding with them to deal damage. An issue I had with the enemies was they would continue to damage the player while they were in their dying animation. To remedy this at the time I made the zombies disappear during their death animation so they could no longer collide with the player. Knowing what I know now, I would go back and change this so that the zombies can play their full death animation while not being able to do damage to the player.
