Syber Skimmer

• Project Lead:

  • As the Project Lead, I helped maintain a cohesive workflow that enabled our team to reach many of its goals.

  • How did we achieve that?

    • Each week we set up sprints and goals we wanted to reach in a reasonable time frame. If the team wasn't able to produce a proof of concept we would go back to the drawing board and think of a new idea and come up with another proof of concept, going until we had something tangible we could manipulate and work upon.​

  • Implementing new features was not without challenge, there were times our systems would stop working the next time we booted up our project but with troubleshooting and persistence we were always able to push through. 

• Level Design:

  • As the Lead Level Designer, I was able to break down our first major level into "Monuments".
    The goal of each monument was to house different forms of terrain alongside unique visuals.

  • I designed each monument to be distinct from the others by incorporating different visuals. The Train Station Monument in the bottom left picture is different from the Tower Monument by its contrasting horizontal structure meanwhile the Tower is vertical nearly touching the height of the playable space.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    The inside of the Train Station Monument is vastly different from the inside of the Tower, housing levitating trains on their respective tracks. By creating different terrain in the player's environment I was able to give the player landmarks to both orient themselves as well as distinguish their surroundings.
     

  • The Boss Room I am especially proud of considering the time we had to create the level and its mechanics. "The Malfunction" is an enemy that was created by taking one of the turret enemies, scaling them up, and giving them some mechanics, and a beefy new health bar. Though to go along with this new big bad guy a new playspace was needed.
     

  • Welcome to the Boss Level. I created this environment with the player's increased movement in mind as well as the Boss's abilities. The area in this arena is quite open though including four main safe zones, outlined in red boxes below.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
     

  • These four main safe zones house many different pick-ups ranging from ammo pick-ups to health pick up. The player has a few options to tackle this Boss fight, they have the ability to hunker down and play around one corner picking up pickups or at a higher level of engagement, they can use their mobility to maneuver around the arena grabbing pick-ups. The player can chain pick-ups by rotating between the four safe zones having high ammo counts and not need to worry about the Boss widdling away at their health points.
     

  • Though how do you defeat the Malfunction?

    • The Boss has 2 health gates, meaning the player can damage the boss until 66% of its health, that's when an immune shield pops up and an exposed blue crystal appears on the left and right sides of the boss's platform. Once a player destroys the crystal, the shield drop and the player is once again able to damage The Malfunction. The Player must destroy the two crystals than the boss in order to clear the level. Throughout the design process this was my favorite part of creating Syber Skimmer, making the mechanics to the level and the arena. ​​

• Combat Design

  • Working closely with our Combat Designer I was able to help channel our creative visions into unique weaponry for the player to pick up and use throughout playing our game. I wanted there to be loadouts for our game, ways for the player to express themselves and their playstyles via our weapons. To achieve this we designed a system that gave the player three options, one primary, secondary, and heavy weapon. 
     

  • Primary Weapons such as The Bigger Iron shown below was designed to fulfill that neon cowboy fantasy, firing a huge bullet out of a powerful hand cannon of a weapon. Primary weapons have the biggest ammo reserves and deal a moderate amount of damage. 
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
     

  • Secondary Weapons such as The Second Chance are a bit tighter on ammo but definitely pack a punch with their damage output and even more unique characteristics. This is my favorite secondary weapon due to it being dual-wielded and has a multitude of ricocheting bullets that fire into enemies.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
     

  • The last weapon to choose in your loadout is a Heavy Weapon. These weapons are true powerhouses delivering an enormous amount of damage to enemies. Though the downside to them is their limited ammo capacity. The D.D.O.S. shown below is a fire and forget type weapon, once that rocket is shot the enemy Swarm is definitely going down.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    What was amazing during the design process of our weapons were incremental playtests. They let us gauge how players were interacting with the systems we implemented, such as ammo consumption, damage of the weapons, and how weapons interacted with enemies leading us to create critical hit spots on our enemies to reward player aim.

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• My takeaway from this amazing experience

  • I couldn't have asked for a better experience for my last semester at college studying game design. The ability to create a game from the ground up, design all the aspects and have people give incredible feedback at the East Coast Games Conference is something I'll cherish for the rest of my life. This experience has only made me more determined to work in the video game industry creating games that inspire, include, and create fun for players.