Zombie Rush More Info

To design a Carnival Zombie Map, I first researched and looked at current carnivals or theme park diagrams to better understand the layout of the park. After looking at the designs, I determined that the 

We initially wanted to have a three lane map design similar to what the Call of Duty multiplayer maps have. The idea of this was to make sure that the players are always on their toes and that the zombies were always a constant threat. The tighter, three lane map design would ensure that and also be familiar to most FPS players.

However, we decided against it and switched to a Left4Dead style map design after realizing that the three lane design was too limiting and made the map size too small.

The new Left4Dead style design had only one way for the player to go through, but it felt more like a carnival and made it possible for more zombies to spawn and overwhelm the player.

With the new map, the zombie behavior and locations of the zombie spawns were key to making sure the game still had the frenetic pace and feel that we were looking for. I didn't quite achieve it with my design and implementation.

I was not used to designing for multiple players. The addition of multiple players added complexity to the design and I was not prepared. I should have playtested earlier to find out the imperfections earlier.

We didn't plan ahead by a lot, so our code was imperfect. Sometimes when one aspect of the game's design broke or had issues something else would also break. This slowed us down with bug fixing and implementation.

Implementing online networking was a struggle. Huge problems popped up such as lag, synchronizing the health, damage, UI, and animation glitches. We sometimes didn't catch these problems until we playtested as a team.

I didn't get the coop elements quite to work together. Players should have been rewarded for sticking together and punished for separating but in our game players have no real reason to stick together.

Zombie spawns were not designed well; the map was too big and had too much empty space. Players could simply run past the zombies on the map, which we did not intend.

I came up with this zombie wave set piece to add variety and to further challenge the player. After completing 75% of the map, players will enter an area where they have to activate a generator to open the gate to the exit.

Players would be trapped for a certain amount of time while zombie waves will spawn and surround the player.

I wanted the area to be somewhat open to allow the player or players room to evade the zombies.

 The amount of zombies that spawned and the time between waves were playtested and iterated on but unfortunately the spawning of zombies would lag the entire game.

There were also UI and player synchronization issues that came with the implementation of this setpiece.