CEOVERKILL

High Octane First Person Melee Action

CEOverkill is a team project of 11 members for our second year at university.

I work as a systems and level designer on the project. I aim to ensure the game feels rewarding and enjoyable to play whilst maintaining a degree of difficulty and challenge.

The game stemmed from us wanting to do our own take on rouge-likes and tower defense games. Focusing on melee combat and fluidity of movement, the purpose of the game is for the player to survive waves of enemies through an ever challenging and expanding tower.

We finished development in April 2019. We plan on performing some bugfixes for a later release in 2020.

EXPANDING EXISTING LEVELS

Below you will find levels that were initially concepted by other team members that were then passed to me to iterate and improve upon.

I used this as a challenge to learn how to take someone elses work and expand and improve upon it, trying to give it a fresh take whilst keeping elements of the original that worked.

CLICK on any image to see my comments on my changes.

Bridge Floor

"Spider" Floor

CREATING DYNAMIC SPACES WITH ANIMATION AND TIMELINES

For the last floor within our game, I wanted to "wow" the player, and really catch them off guard. Each floor up until this point uses structures and objects, so to see an empty floor would immediately give a sense that this was different.
I then experimented by stretching out our floor tiles and, taking inspiration from the giants causeway, created what you see below. First painting the pattern, then testing the animations and speeds, before finally implementing all the animations and timeline work.

REFLECTION

This game was a hugely out of our scope looking back at it.

Having both first person melee and creating AI within a period 8 months was definitely biting off more than the team and myself could chew.

However I learned a lot from this project! Looking back at my contributions and the game as a whole, there is a lot that we could of differently.

It took us as a team, as well as myself as long time to get this game into a players hands. Which was our first mistake. This game needed a lot of player input when it came to feedback on combat and feedback on the levels.

The vast majority of the level work was done closer to the end of production due to the fact we kept having problems with AI and Player Combat which I had to assist with. The team then scrambled to create their own level, which I then went over and did my own passes on.

The passes I did were based on player data where we recorded a players movements in engine, allowing me to see which aspects of the levels players were getting stuck on, as well as parts that weren't utilised.

What I would change if I were to approach the game again, is to get the prototype into players hands earlier, and work on creating solid feedback for the player sooner, rather than towards the end of production.

I learned a lot when it came to communication between the team as we had a number of issues when it came to vision. I also learned how to be given a scene, and using data, create my own version of it, which when working with more than one level designer in the future could be very useful.