RAID THE PLANT (WIP) | Kaleb Brooks

RAID THE PLANT

RAID THE PLANT is a fast-paced FPS that combines platformer elements with extreme FPS gameplay and a unique style

Play as The Sergeant, a man with one task. RAID THE PLANT and destroy it from the inside!

Team: 1 | Role: Designer/Programmer | Timeline: 6 Weeks | Tools: Unity, Miro, FPS Engine, Adobe Illustrator, Microsoft Word

DESIGN PILLARS

Replayability

Level was intentionally designed with replayability in mind. I included several level skips that the player will typically only realise after playing the dominant path first.

Unique Style

Designed with a striking visual and audio style to stand apart from other shooters.

Platforming x Shooting

Extreme care had to be taken to ensure that platforming puzzles were clear and didnt ruin pacing. Lots of playtesting was done on this design principle to ensure it was smooth.

Direct Pathing

Pathing for level was to be extremely straightforward upon first look, but still allow room for player agency. All puzzles were designed to be easily solvable, but faster more interesting options are available upon replay or if you're a quick thinker.

GAMEPLAY

PROGRAMMING/TECH DESIGN

CHECKPOINTS

Initially I began developing the checkpoint system to use the transform.position property of the player to teleport him when respawning. I quickly realized that wouldn't work and opted to manually activate a new instance of the player at the checkpoints.

I knew I wanted the spawn point script to be accessible from the inspector, that way I could easily add spawn logic as shown here. The script allows me to manually deactivate certain objects or call public scripts using the SendMessage() function.

Interaction:

A crucial aspect of this level was interactability with it. Players would need to activate terminals and destroy pipes around the level to progress. To do this I created a few scripts that could be easily tweaked and used in the editor.

These are fully customizable and allow you to call functions easily on any fan or set them as active/inactive.

The barrel has some additional components, allowing it to play a specific sound (used for halting the fans).

The map I developed was extremely large and contained over 100 enemies. This inevitably began to cause massive performance issues, so I needed to take to some methods to make it work better.

CULLING:

By default, Unity3D incorporates frustum culling on all cameras. But it's not enough at certain angles.

I incorporated distance culling on all enemies, deactivating their renderer and AI when too far from the player.

Occlusion Culling: I manually set the entirety of my static level (which took hours) as static and baked the occlusion culling to boost performance by well over 80%.