The Spookynizers
The Spookynizers is a school project I made in 2 weeks with a team of 8. It is a 3 player, cooperative twin stick shooter made on Unity. Each player incarnates a child fighting with his multi-function laser-gun : this gun attacks and interact with his environment. The players are able to cross the streams and accumulate the power of their lasers to activate the Synergy, which increase the effects of the lasers : aoe effects, power activations ... The players must communicate, cooperate and use their gun wisely to prevent the nightmare creatures to invade the house.
I was Technical Designer, and I was in charge of integration and UI design. UI was a huge challenge, since there were a lot of information to give the players, and the game is kind of frenetic, so players didn't have time to look at different points of the screen. I had the luck to work with a dedicated UI artist, so we worked together and iterated on the UI design. I was also in charge of designing and coding the main menu. I settled with a 3D menu with credits and characters visible. Level selection was also 3D, and players had the opportunity to move and shoot before actually playing the game. Overall I am pretty satisfied with the UI on this game, even if I think it could be simplified a little bit.
The programmers had a tremendous workload, so I focused on limiting my merge conflicts with them to the maximum. Since I was also in charge of integration, I had to write all the integration scripts. I coded them separately with a minimum of inspector input (very GetComponent heavy), so the programmers could just drag and drop them on the mesh objects and everything would work just fine. This is not very optimized, but we didn't have time to do that and overall, the programmers estimated this method saved us 2 days of work (which is a lot in 2 weeks).
Made with Florent Juchniewicz, Loïc Bourdrel, Guillaume Faguet, Guillaume Rivière, Maxime Bak, Dealan Lipka, Clémence Descharles, Félix Pinchon and Éric Escher.
What I did
- Macro game design (high concept)
- Writing design documentation
- Designing the UI with another artist
- Integrating UI and other elements
What I learnt
- Working closely with a UI artist
- Reducing the workload of programmers
- Avoiding merge conflicts on Git