Escape From Zartron 8

In 2020 I decided to join in the 7-Day FPS Jam. Which is a game jam where you… build an FPS Game in 7 days. Since I’d never actually made a “regular” FPS game before, I thought it would be a fun opportunity to try something new out. In particular, I wanted to focus on the level design, since that’s not something I usually work with in my day-to-day professional life. The concept behind the game was to be a short sequence of levels where a spaceship pilot gets shot down by aliens, and has to escape. There were two levels: a breakout from the crash site to get to a train line. The other was a branching-path enemy-dense slugfest which went either through a warehouse or a command center before reaching a replacement ship which the player could use to escape. With limited time (on top of jamming, I was also working full-time and parenting), I decided to use exclusively downloaded assets, instead of spending time making my own. To that end, I used mostly from Kenney. For a jam game, it was fairly feature-reach. There were multiple weapons which performed differently. Enemy AI which handled player awareness and aggressiveness. I even had level starting and ending cutscenes! As with most of my projects, this was made using the Unity 3d engine. I used the built-in AI agents and navmeshes, as I wasn’t using any ingame features that I often go to - like procedural level generation - which are incompatible with that built-in system. It was refreshingly simple, but was of course not particularly refined or robust. Either way, I was happy with how the project came out! For more details on the game, check the itch.io page