Day Of The Swimming Dead

This game was created for the GJL Summer Parade game jam. The theme was "One Time Use" which we implemented by having the player throw away the weapon after each use. For this jam we were given a week to create the game and then a further week to "polish".

I worked on design and the level design UE4 landscape, materials and placement of all the assets. I also worked on all the environmental assets as well as the weapons.

For this project I used 3ds Max, Substance Painter and Unreal Engine 4.

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When designing Day of the Swimming Dead we looked at multiple ideas for the theme of one time use. Early ideas involved using inputs that could only be used once each per level to complete puzzle games. However in the end we decided on a wave survival game where every weapon the player picked up simply had one use.

The player mechanics were very simple as the player could only move around, aim and shoot the weapons. We did not include jumping or any other movement based mechanics.

The enemies were also designed to be fairly simple. On spawn they will take the shortest path to the player and continue to chase the player. Over time the frequency of the spawning will also increase.

Guns were set to shoot a variety of random projectiles as well as utilizing a random firing pattern. Sometimes these would therefore be more beneficial to the player or less so.

Power Ups could also be sued to strategically destroy all enemies, speed up player movement or heal the payer.

Here is a breakdown of the gameplay loop.

This is the initial sketch for the map which is fairly simple in design. I wanted to make sure each island was slightly unique in design which would allow players that played repeatedly to learn the map and where the different bridges were. This was especially important as some of the islands have more bridges than others and intentionally the piers looked at a quick glance likes bridges as well.

Since I also created the 3D Models for the project the models ad UV's can be found below these screenshots of the game.