Unarmed

Overview

Unarmed is an old school first person shooter that incorporates a dynamic elemental combat system. Players push through a nefarious facility in a high stakes dungeon crawl environment. With an assortment of weapons, they aim to afflict enemies with various status effects that imbue penalties. Afflicted enemies are rendered vulnerable to a secondary set of actions including being punched, grabbed and thrown. This creates an intense loop of gunplay and physics interactions culminates in a gripping bossfight.

This was a cross-disciplinary capstone project that spanned 6 months. While multiple iterations of the game were prototyped in the Unity engine, the game was eventually ported to a proprietary custom engine streamlined to cater to the game's specific needs. As the design lead and Art Lead, I oversaw the game's design direction and artistic vision from concept to final product.

Wearing Many Hats

I was stretched all over the place during the development of Unarmed. My initial work was spent prototyping base game mechanics. As the game got rebuilt in the custom engine, I pivoted to level design and planning. This led me to branch out to assist with environmental modelling and character texturing, all the while assisting with the technical implementation of mechanics and features. On the side, I also worked on user interface elements and sourcing sound effects. Towards the end, I helped to refine the gameplay further by drawing and integrating cutscenes for a narrative structure and developing the bossfight mechanics.

I was stretched thin but I weirdly enjoyed the process. I appreciated the challenge of juggling various tasks of different disciplines as it allowed me to have a deeper understanding of how each of the game's systems are intertwined, and thus which sections are best prioritised during each development milestone. Flexing over to assist struggling team members on tasks also let me to understand different working styles, allowing me to better delegate the workload based on individual strengths to greater results and improving team morale.