Scrapshoot

Overview

Scrapshoot is a fast-paced, FPS rogue-like game designed by a team of friends during the final semester of our grad program. It started as a theory dream a few friends came up with, that ended up expanding into a group project. We wanted to combine elements of rogue-likes and shooter to create a frantic and satisfying experience.

Design & Development

For this project we developed around an established code base and asset pack set up by one of out earliest teammates. My contributions mainly lied in polishing the core gameplay of the character, so much of my time was dedicated to modifying the asset pack as I saw fit.

One of the main things I spent time tweaking was the feel of the player character. The movement of the character initially felt rather slow and floaty, which didn’t fit the vision of a tight, fast paced shooter experienced. I spent a good amount of time polishing up the movement values, focusing on reaching a quicker, heavier feel that made the movement feel responsive, intentional, and satisfying. I also added a few additional movement mechanics to spice up traversal, such as dashing, double jumping, and vaulting over objects.

With the gun, my goal was to make it as customizable as possible. This was handled by setting up a gun attachment system that modified aspects of the gun as you collected them. I teamed up with the prop artist of our team to represent this visually, as each gun modifier was represented by a component that could be found in the scene and attached to the gun. For example, you could find a nozzle in the scene that you could visually attach to your gun and alter the spread of your gun. I wanted to make sure that this system was simple to develop with, as well as scalable in the event we decided to return to this project in the future.