Gem Hunter

Project Type: Solo

Technology Stack: Unity

Role: Game Designer, Programmer

GitHub: Gem Hunter

---

Demo

Short Description

One of the complex and finished (from a programming point of view) projects I have worked on. The project itself is a 3D top-down shooter with variations of enemies, guns and powerUPs.

The game is created from scratch using Unity Engine and C#. The game itself has the following game features implemented:

• Interactive menu scene
• Animations and Sound Effects
• Game and Cheat settings
• Pause Menu and Level Loading Screen
• Gun and Inventory systems
• Enemy types
• Power Ups and Ammo Drops
• Enemy AI based on weapon type
• Wave mechanic
• Tutorial Level
• Boss with cutscene

Descriptive Detail

The interactive menu scene idea was taken from the “Borderlands” game series. I have implemented it because I find the menu as a welcome screen should be interesting as the game itself, another good example of that is puzzle-platformer Trine 1, where you can play in the menu itself.

The game should work on different resolutions and the player might want to play window mode or decrease the volume of music or sound effects settings were introduced. Moreover, as all shooter games require some skill and training, I have implemented a “cheats” menu for players who want to playtest the game and its mechanics but does not want to spend a lot of time on it.

As it is one player game and as a player, sometimes, you want to pause the game or exit to the menu, I have implemented a pause menu. But being game developers, we want to load the level without freezing a player camera. As the result, I have added a loading scene, where text fills up till the scene is being loaded.

To make the game more attractive from a game design point of view, I have implemented different enemies, gun types and power-ups. To make it possible to differ enemy types I coloured them, and for guns, I have created different 3D models using Unity. Also, as guns have limited ammo, I also have added ammo drops from enemies.

The gameplay consists of the tutorial level, where the player can pick up different items, then comes 5 waves and the final boss level. The boss was build using FSM (finite state machine) approach, where each state represented a new attack pattern.

To Improve

After playing a little, I like the game, but there are a few things that needed to be changed to make this game even better.

• Visuals – colour palette, particles, animation
• Environment – background, textures, lighting
• Sound – some are too loud, some too quite
• Boss cinematics – text is blurry
• Control mapping