October 2021- December 2021
Game Background
Utilizing the Single Player FPS template for Unreal Engine 4, I created a potential level for a game I called Cell Hunt.
Cruelty knows no bounds. You are the product of countless years of genetic testing. You are the first of many subjects to survive these awful experiments. These enhancements have given you increased strength, resilience, and speed. The people behind these experiments have murdered many through their trials and you don’t want any more to do with it. You rip the bars of your cell open and must escape.
My Work
Down below will be a few sketch images I made for a basic layout of the level. I split the map into 3 images because the level has 3 main encounters with enemies.
WhiteBoxing
In these designs, I wanted to incorporate scaling difficulty and I did this through repetitive spawning in specific locations. In the first map, Chargers spawn once. In the second, one Charger spawns every 15 seconds. In the third, 2 Chargers will spawn every 15 seconds until all other enemies are defeated. This would keep the player on their guard while enemies are constantly thrown at them. I did include periods between the encounters so the player could choose to explore and find ammo, health pickups, or even new weapons to aid them. In the third map, the player can go across a bridge with very little cover, putting them at risk. This is rewarded with a high-power rocket launcher weapon so the player can clear the level faster.
AI and Level Modifications
At first, one of the main issues was that the soldier enemies and the charger enemies would constantly be moving. This was hard to play against and made it difficult for the player to manage the chargers running at them. My goal wasn't to overwhelm the player right at the beginning. I fixed this by removing the option to move or strafe from the soldiers so that all they could do was crouch if they got low on health. This made the gameplay much easier to handle after playtesting.
The next problem was that in Encounter 3, the enemies would spawn out in the open, the player could visibly see them spawning and running to the stairs. It was easy to shoot the chargers before they even posed a threat to the player at all. I decided to change the structure of the end to be enclosed so that the spawning is hidden as well as make it more difficult to shoot the chargers preemptively.
Comparison of initial White Box to Final Changed Encounter 3
The Challenges + What I learned
The most difficult part of making this was creating the right AI behavior for the chargers. I hadn't done much work with AI before this so it was difficult figuring out how behavior trees worked in order to get them moving. I only wanted them to run along a path until aggroed by the player, in which they would just take the quickest path to the player. In most cases, it would only do one or the other. I fixed this by going into the behavior tree and testing different nodes by deleting them and bringing them back to see the behavioral changes to the AI. This helped me to understand the importance of all the current behavioral nodes in the tree as well as improve my knowledge on AI pathing and tracking.
I also learned about level design and how important it is to gameplay. The way a level is constructed impacts how the player moves, what decisions they can make in their environment, and how they complete the level. Adding benefits to exploring gives the player more incentive to slow down and check out hidden spots. Of course, players can still just rush through the level but, that little change to the design adds a whole new playstyle for the users.
Final Screenshots
