Into The Fray - Game Design Blog

By Akashdeep Mathur

Hello reader! Welcome to my game design blog about my game "Into The Fray". A little bit about what the game is: its a third-person, 2-4 player, co-op, post apocalyptic and futuristic shooter game, where you fight zombies, collect items, and make your way through the levels.

This blog shows my weekly journey I embarked on in order to complete this project as part of my university assignment. Enjoy!

Week 1:

    The development of this project began with brainstorming for ideas and taking inspirations from games that all the members of the team have played. Most of our time this week was just spent getting to know each other, bonding over the games that we've played, and brainstorming ideas for our game project. We decided to create a 4 player, 3rd person zombie shooter game, largely inspired from the 2019 game World War Z, developed by Saber Interactive.

World War Z was the main source of our inspiration for this project. From the hordes of zombies to the UI, we took our lessons in game design from this game and tried to figure out what worked and what didn't.

There were many other games as well where we got our insipirations from, such as the Dead Space remake (2023), Genshin Impact, Destiny 2, Gunfire Reborn, Control, and many more. We tried to take the best elements of these different games and figure how they work best for our game.

World War Z
(image source: https://wwzgame.com/#media-gallery-16)

    For the tone and themes of the game, we wanted it to be a futuristic post apocalyptic setting. We wanted to make the players feel uneasy and evoke a sense of fear. The game has a dark and moody atmosphere to it that was insipred from many survival/horror games such as the Dead Space remake. 

Dead Space (2023)

(image source: https://www.gameinformer.com/sites/default/files/styles/full/public/2023/01/12/9ecfc86c/dead_space_remake_header.jpg)

   

Week 2:

    Once we had an idea about what our game was going to be like. the developers had started to prototype a few of the basic gameplay mechanics, such as the player mechanics and the third person camera controller. The engine we choose was Unity as it provided us with the flexibility we needed to create our game. It is also the engine that our developers were comfortable with.

I, however, was new to unity so I had to learn how to use it from the ground up. I did have some prior knowledge about Unity's UI, but it was fairly limited. So I got to learning how to mkae games in Unity. There were several tutorials that I followed on YouTube from channels.

    

Unity Tutorials that I learned from

YouTube channel Code Monkey is a great place to learn Unity

Week 3:

    After learning the basics of Unity for a week, I moved on to finding more inspirations for our game. This was mainly for the level design and for the different gameplay mechanics that we were going to include. We started to divide the work and we started to decide on the core concepts and started developing the narrative for the game. We also started to organize and create a workflow for our game and figuring out the different tools we would need. 

We used GitFork and GitHub to make sure we are working on the same file

I started looking for 3D assets for inspiration and references on Sketchfab

Week 4:

    By this point of time we had solidified a good idea for the core concepts for the game. I had set up a Trello board that I shared with my team members to help us organize and keep a track of the different tasks that we have.

The Trello Board for our Project

    The programmers had started prototyping some of the different mechanics and systems that we would have in our level, and implementing a few basic features such as a health and stamina bar.

Health and Stamina bars

Week 5:

    During this week we still weren't sure about what we wanted our levels to be like. I had initially thought of setting the game in an old abandoned cinema. The cinema would be 2 floors high and will have at least 4-5 screens of different sizes.

Rough model of an abandoned cinema for the level design

 I was still looking for inspiration and more references that I could use for level design. 

Week 8:

  I have established some foundational design pillars that we will use for all the design elements of our game. These design pillars are fundamental to our design process and act as the bases for it.

Game Design Pillars for our Game

    During this week we had also started some of the level design. Our game has 2 levels: a parking lot, and a factory. I was responsible for the level design of the parking lot. The main aim of this level was to make it sort of a tutorial level that helps the players get familiarized with the different gameplay mechanics.

An early version of the parking lot level designed in Blender

Week 9:

  I started working on detailing the level design for the parking lot at this point. The level is supposed to have a security room in it, which sort of ties into our narrative as well. 

Security Cabin interior made in Blender

  I also sat down with one of the developers to create a bare bones main menu. We decided to keep it fairly simple with only 3 buttons: Play, Settings, and Exit (the 3 basic ones in almost every main menu).

Main Menu UI and layout

We wanted to make something similar to the main menu seen in the game Last of Us, but we wanted to change things a bit to better suit our game. There will be one of the player characters just looking out of the window, and some leaves and other kinds of plants growing on the walls outside. 

The settings button would have very limited functionality, mainly for changing the volume and perhaps some graphical settings as well, but we haven't decided on it yet. 

The Last of Us title screen
(image screenshot taken from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpcJzUnJBYk&ab_channel=PressStartOnce)

Week 10:

  I started to work on designing the different player HUD elements that we will need for our game. We have decided that the players will have certain types of abilities based on the class of character. There will be 4 different classes: Tank, Attacker, Medic, Impulse.

The different ideas we had for the character classes

  The inspiration for these abilities and classes came from different games like Destiny, Valorant, Apex Legends, etc. In the image show above, the green highlighted ones were the abilites we went with, and the red ones were the rejected.

Week 11:

  We started to try and put together the level from Blender to Unity. We tried to export the whole level as one single mesh, but that created issues with the colliders. So we had to export each asset individually (which took a long time). 

A list of the different items we need in the Parking Lot level

This list is not a final list, as we might add or remove assets depending on our need. All the assets we used for the parking lot level design have to be according to the theme of the game, which is sci fi, futuristic, and post-apocalyptic. Since I am not very good at modelling, and trying to model all the assets would take a really long time, all the models I used were taken from Sketchfab.com. 

Week 12:

  I sat down with the other designers tried to finalize what the player flow would be like. Our game has 2 main levels: a parking lot and a factory. The factory level is further divided into sub sections.

Player flow for our game

These levels aren't exactly linear all the way through. To increase player replayability, we thought of adding shortcuts in certain sections of the factory that let you skip an entire sub section, but there will be some kind of challenge there of course. They will probably need a couple of play throughs to unlock anyway.

Week 13:

  I started to play around with the lighting for the parking lot level. The lighting is done using an HDRI (high dynamic range image). There are other effects added to the scene as well such as fog. This week was mostly spent trying to play around with the values and seeing what works and what doesn't work.

Parking Lot level design

I also started to work on testing some of the enemy design in Blender. I found a base model on Sketchfab.com and tweaked it a bit to make it look different. The zombies are supposed to have some kind of fleshy look to them.

Zombie shader test 1 in Blender

This version has more of a red color of the zombie. There is another version which is slightly purple.

Zombie shader test 2 in Blender

Week 14:

  By this time most of the major assets were in place for the parking lot level design, and many of the major systems were also added. I proceed to add some decals such cracks and blood stains in various differnt places. I also added a dead zombie in one part of the map and replaced some of the vehicals with the destroyed ones. 

I had also started to work on some of the VFX for the game. Since I am not familiar with Unity's VFX graph or its particle systems, I had to spend time to learn them first.

Along side this, I was also working on the UI for the game. I fairly new to UI design as well, so I started by looking at references first. We had decided that we wanted the UI to look simple and easy to understand and read.

The main inspiration for the UI for me came from the game World War Z, since it was our main inspiration for the whole game itself. Its UI is fairly simple in its design and easy to understand at a quick glance. The UI I designed was also inspired by it, but I changed a few things here and there to better suit out game's needs.

Design of the PLayer HUD

Week 15:

  Progress was going a little slow at this point in terms of the design for the game. I was working on some more VFX assets like the muzzle flash for the game. The bulk of the progress was being done in the development side, where we have implemented certain features and done a lot of clean up and bug fixes for systems that we already had.

I also helped one of the developers in designing the backgrounds for the main menu scene.

Week 16:

  During this week I had made a video that will be played during one of the player display name creation scene.

There were other minor changes done, such as changing all the fonts in the game to the game's main font: Spectrashell.

Player Display Name Scene

Week 17:

  This week I worked on finding the right sounds for our game. So far we only had 2 differnet ambient and background sounds, one that would play during the gameplay in the parking lot level, and one that plays for everything before it.

To find all the sounds I am using Splice, which is a paid platform for high quality audio files. Since a lot of the sounds here are made by professional musicians and music producers, it only seemed correct to source most of our audio from here.

I downloaded different sounds for enemies, for the UI and menus, for the weapons, the characters, and some ambient sounds.

Splice was used for downloading audio

I also started to look for new character models as so far we have been using the default character from Unity. I turned to Sketchfab.com to look for the characters we could use.

Character taken from Sketchfab

I ended up with a few different character options. Now all that was left was to animate them in Mixamo and hand them over to the developer to import them into the game.

Week 18:

  The characters that I found online did not work with our project. This was mainly due to way the developer had set up the code, it would become too complicated and would require a lot of rework to use the Mixamo animations.

For some characters the model wouldn't even load onto Mixamo to begin with. This is a huge set back for us, and this technical limitation is a little disheartening. We ended up using only 1 model from Mixamo, and making different color variations for the character to show 4 different players. I also made icons for the 4 variations that we use in the character selections screen.

The final character we used in our game

I created some additional UI elements for the settings tab in our game. I designed a control scheme layout for keyboard and mouse and for a controller.

Controls on a XBox Controller

Controls for Keyboard and Mouse

I also made some additionaly VFX assets for the abilities that the characters have. But unfortunately we only have 2 abililties in our game, a dash and a force push ability.

The developer did finally implement all the sounds that I had downloaded, so now our game is starting to sound a lot better. 

I also worked on some final touch ups to the level design, as it is the final week before submission for our project. I added some trees and mountains outside the parking lot.

We still have one more sub section of the factory level to work on; the lighting, the sound design, the enemy placement, adding the VFX, makign sure everything works over the network, etc.