Operation: Takeover

Breach and clear each room to eliminate all hostiles and secure the hostage in a top-down twitch shooter based in an 80’s film set.

My Contribution to this game:

At the beginning of game jam two I was excited to use some of the skills I had learnt in the first game and from other game jams I had been doing in my own time, as the first game was only my second game using unreal engine and had been written in purely c++ I knew we could make a larger an more complex game this time, in this game jam I took more of an unofficial leadership role within the programmers as they were always consulting me on how we should solve problems and I made a lot of the decisions about the core mechanics of the game.

Day 1:

I first started by making the player class, this was a top down 3D game so I had to make the player controls always stay on the same axis no matter what way they are facing and I also had to make it so that the player always faced the cursor using cursor hit scans. I also created the core functionality for shooting so that reload speed and shoot speed could just be changed for each weapon, as most of our level would be dark I also included a spotlight that would always point where the player is looking. As we had not fully decided what we wanted to have in our game at this point I also created functionality for two different types of traps, a spike trap that would deploy whenever the player walks over it and a tripwire that uses a particle beam and collision to detect when someone has walked over it. I made a range of lighting prefabs to be added into the levels (flashing light, RGB lights, RGB floor panels). I made a physics constraint door that would swing open when the player walks into it. Next I worked on creating the enemy spawner this would be fully customizable so that the level designer could decide exactly where and when they wanted the enemy to spawn, the spawned enemies health and damage, whether they wanted the enemy to walk somewhere after they had spawned and where to walk to and finally whether they wanted to repeat the spawn of that enemy and how many times. I created a UI that could be improved upon using sprites in the future that included health ammo weapon type and deaths. I set up GitHub source control so that project files could be easily shared between the developers. I also made a disappearing roof that would block view of other rooms until the player has entered that room and finally, I made a dance floor prefab ready to go in the casino/club level.

I was incredibly proud of my progress after day one as I had basically created all of the main functionality for the player and a lot of the level elements so that we could now spend the rest of the week improving upon these elements and designing levels.

Day 2:

I started day two by improving upon another team members AI enemies, firstly I added functionality for them to be able to walk to a set location which will have been set in the spawner and then made their aiming much smoother by calculating the exact rotation they need to be at all times using vectors instead of using the behaviour tree look at function which only works in 10 degree intervals. On this day I also fully implemented two types of locked doors one with a key pickup and one with a code pad that uses widgets and can be interacted with by the player. I also figured out how to get the enemies to walk through my physics based doors using a nav link proxy as they are not traversable by default and finally I started blocking out the first level within our build using one of the designers level designs.

Day 3:

On day 3 I implemented all the player character and enemy character animations using state machines and blend spaces so that all animations could be smoothly played at the right times. Then I added a muzzle flash vfx using skeleton sockets and added some of the gun sounds and updated the weapon pickups to work with skeleton meshes and finally I populated the fist level with props and enemy spawners, at this point we had a playable first level and just needed to add a way to get between levels and could spend the rest of the week improving and polishing.

Day 4:

I started by implementing elevators for switching between levels which included a camera shake and music. I fixed up all of the collisions so that bullets could no longer go through some objects, I replaced the door mesh with one made by the designers, added more weapon sounds, added a RPG explosion VFX that would be played whenever the RPG rocket is fired. I made it so that enemies would ragdoll when they die, and their bodies would just be left on the floor instead of disappearing straight away. I made 3 more Camera shakes (Taking damage, getting a kill and explosions). I implemented the main menu, recorded some voice lines, and implemented everyone else’s into the game. I added a slow-motion ability that could be activated when the player kills a certain number of enemies. I made it so that only guns that the player has unlocked are displayed on the UI. I implemented the blood splatter VFX when an enemy dies, Populated the office with some additional props. Fixed a cook error that was stopping us from building the game into a windows application. I made a toilet 3D model asset and used it to create the toilet room in office and added an AK boss room. I revamped all the lighting in the HQ level. I created some sprites for the Health bar and Slow time powerup indicator on the UI, gave the hostages in the HQ level a mesh and idle animation. Added a text popup when you pick up a key and finally created a pause menu.

Day 5: We just used day 5 for play testing and bug fixes, throughout this day the programmes went through 3 iterations of playtesting and then bug fixes off the back of these play tests. I do not have a full list of all the bugs fixed.