Zombie Horde
Gameplay Demo and Showing Building Design
About the Project:
Zombie Horde was developed as a group project made with four other classmates. We decided to make a third-person action survival game where the player must shoot their way through zombies that have overrun the compound. The player must explore the various buildings in order to collect five bomb pieces and find the key to the central building, where they will set off the bomb in order to stop the zombies from escaping and infecting others. The game includes a difficulty system (from "Easy" to "Good Luck") which controls the number of enemies present in the level. Players may upgrade their health and weapon strength through pick ups spread across the map, as well as temporarily increase their speed.
My primary role in the developing the project was to add the buildings and related mechanics - like door interaction, the lift platform, the key, bomb pieces and the win condition. I was also the Git Manager for the team, overseeing the pull requests and merging branches to keep the project up to date and conflict free for the rest of the team. Other areas of the project that were handled by my teammates include the landscape/exterior environment, the player character, the enemy AI, HUD & menus, and the pickups & upgrades.
Tools Used:
Unreal Engine 4.27, Git Bash, Bitbucket
Epic Marketplace Assets (personally used): Free Furniture Pack, Industry Props Pack, Infinity Blade Props, Infinity Blade Effects, Loft Office (Modular), Military Weapons Dark, 4 in 1 Modular Research Facility Mega Bundle, and assets added by other team members
Video Music: https://www.glitchthegame.com/
Highlighted Skills:
- Ability to produce a complete project as part of a team, using Source Control (Git, Bitbucket)
- Level design and lighting with basic geometry and imported assets
- Understanding of common Unreal Engine functions/tools (e.g. materials and textures, different light types)
- Gameplay design and scripting with Blueprints (e.g. interaction with doors, using a Game Instance Blueprint, changing actor component parameters during gameplay)
Design Before & After Examples:
Player Base and Medical Building (before)
Player Base and Medical Building (updated)
Barracks and Office (before)
Barracks and Office (updated)
Warehouse and Power Station/Goal (before)
Warehouse and Power Station/Goal (updated)
Reflection:
This project is an example of the first time I worked with a team of other developers rather than making a solo project. Working as a group was an overall positive experience, in spite of the initial dread one generally feels when assigned to a group project with a bunch of strangers. However, all it really took was our initial meeting to break the ice and start brainstorming about our game for our mutual passion of game development to bring us all together. That doesn't mean that the experience wasn't without challenges. Roles and tasks were divided up amongst the team at the first meeting but not all team members followed through equally, resulting in the rest of the team having to pick up the slack (particularly toward the end of the assignment). As was said above though, those of us who were engaged with the project all found the experience of collaborating to be highly rewarding.
My role on the team was to place and design the different buildings on the level map. These buildings were kept relatively simple in design for the initial project because of size limitations on the Bitbucket repository - and another team member was immediately insistent about using an auto-landscape material they had purchased already, even though it took up nearly half of the repository's LFS. Because I had the secondary role of being the group's Git Master and overseeing the repository I was especially mindful of my impact to the repository's size while making my contributions to the game's development. This role also put me in charge of approving my teammates' pull requests and merging their branches into the project without conflict. To make sure the whole team was using Git and the repository all in the same way, I began the project by creating a "Git Guide" to walk through the steps they should follow when creating and checking out their own branches and how to push their work correctly to the repository. The team agreed this document was incredibly useful to them and thanks to it and our frequent communication through a dedicated Discord server, we succeeded in avoiding any major source control problems throughout the multi-week assignment.
When it came time to update this project I thought it would be disingenuous to change most of the work my teammates did and still try to present this as an example of a group project. For that reason I chose to focus on improvements that could be made to my contributions to the project - mainly the look of the different buildings . Without the size limit restrictions of a repository to worry about I was able to give each of the buildings it's own identity thanks to various Epic Marketplace assets. Just a few new materials and some static meshes made significant improvements to the quality of this project, as shown in the before and after pictures. Although art and lighting is not my main area of focus, it is still a part of development that interests me and that I'd like to continue to improve upon.
A piece of feedback I received from my teammates that wasn't addressed in the initial project because of it's lower priority was that they felt gameplay could be improved if the doors always opened away from the player, regardless of which side they were on. This was something I was able to add to the refined version. Another improvement related to the buildings the entire team agreed upon was finding a way to deal with the grass mesh from the auto-landscape material coming through the floors and walls in many of the buildings. Even after much Googling, however, we could not find a solution we were able to implement in the initial version. Coming back to the project, I took a closer look at the landscape material and discovered an included layer that could be painted on that prevented foliage growth. This really cleaned up the buildings and made it that much easier to add my other improvements.
