<p>Dungeon Resurgence was the first game I made from start to finish complete with design documents, test plans and community feedback. This was part of my IT level 3 course at college in which I achieved a distinction. I have attached a PDF with my entire 27-page assignment for you to view as that would contain all the information about it. I have also linked the GitHub page where you can download the game and look at all the code I wrote for the game.</p>
<p><a href="/assets/8.2GameDev.pdf">View the PDF here</a></p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/mr-spicysauce/Dungeon-Resurgence">View the GitHub page here</a></p>
<p>This is some game play footage from the final release of the game.</p>
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A full game made for a college assignment which is fully documented.

Dungeon Resurgence

<p>Over the summer holidays, me and 2 other friends played a lot of a game called Project Zomboid. Project Zomboid is a 2D isometric, open-world survival game where you corporately survive the zombie apocalypse. However, this game has no official storyline so as we played we created our own lore and story about how we met, how we survived, and how we died.</p>
<p>This lore later got expanded enough to where we decided to use our creative skills and writing to create a game based on this lore. We had recently played Left for Dead 2 and thought we would follow a similar game progression and style as that. I was the only one with game development skills, however, I wasn't so good with 3d modelling so my friends spent this time learning about 3D modelling and game development as I worked on the code of the game. The name “The Walking Stead” is a play on words from the TV show “The Walking Dead” as the main character from this game is called Del Steadman.</p>
<p>In its current state The Walking Stead has a fairly large 1st level and fully working multiplayer with support for up to 3 people. However, everyone has lost interest in the project for the time being and the project hasn't been worked on for a while except for me working on some of the code every now and then. This is one of the most complicated yet well-thought-out projects I have made to date so I wanted to share this on my website with some screenshots and descriptions of it improved and grew over time.</p>
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This is a video from our last play test showing the state of the game and us just having fun playing it.
<p><img src="/assets/DelsteadmanEarlyScreenshot.PNG" alt="Describe what is in this image">
This is a screenshot of the early development when I was setting up the multiplayer networking and GUI.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/DelsteadmanFigmaDesigns.png" alt="Describe what is in this image">
This is from our Figma file where we designed some of the UI for the game and came up with the unique character 3D selection screen which is rendered in real-time.</p>
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<p><img src="/assets/DelsteadmanSelect1.PNG" alt="Describe what is in this image"></p>
<p><img src="/assets/DelsteadmanSelect2.PNG" alt="Describe what is in this image"></p>
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Here you can see behind the scenes of the room and how I used the white material of the wall to bounce light back onto the characters to make the scene brighter and how dim it would look without it.
<p><img src="/assets/DelsteadmanZombieAI.PNG" alt="Describe what is in this image">
Here is a snapshot of the zombie AI that I made from scratch for the game. This was particularly hard as the zombies in Project Zomboid are really advanced and I wanted to have it as accurate to the original game as possible. Some of the things I implemented were: Zombies will idle around the map over time, Zombies will walk towards the player if they see or hear them, Zombies will lose interest in the player if they don't see or hear them for a while. One of the lesions I learnt about this was about staticky typed vs dynamically typed variables in godot. By not specifying what variable type it is, int, str, array etc.. It left it up to the compiler to interpret it and made the zombie AI a lot less performant than it could have been if I staticky typed it.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/InsideBigHouse.PNG" alt="Describe what is in this image">
We recreated all of the interiors for each house in the area, unfortunately not all the furniture was placed around as people lost interest in making the game for the time being. However, I did go out of my way to add as much life to the game as possible. I did this by making functional light switches for each house and I made animations for intractable objects.</p>
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<p>One of the things I am most proud of is the intractable windows as they are a massive part of the Project Zomboid game. In the game, you can jump though the windows to escape zombies and I went out of my way to make this as polished as possible by adding custom character and camera animations as well as re-implementing a feature from an old game I made where the broken glass had physics and would bounce of your character.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/WalkingSteadConceptArt.png" alt="Describe what is in this image">
Partway through development I got back into 3D rendering and creating cool renders for desktop backgrounds and posters. I decided to dedicate a full day to making some concept art for the game which really motivated the team and inspired some of our ideas.</p>
<p>I would like to credit Ben (parsons00) for helping create the 3D models for the characters, zombies, and environment including outside objects and the furniture.</p>
<p>I would like to credit DJ (HardLadBarry) for creating each of the houses in the game and for being the primary story writer and designer.</p>
<p>I would like to credit <a href="https://quaternius.com/">quaternius</a> and his website as we used his asset packs for many of the in game weapons and items.</p>


The Walking Stead is a fan game of Project Zomboid and Left For Dead 2. 

The Walking Stead

<p>I come from a fairly competitive background playing a lot of CS2, Overwatch 2 and Valorant where I was team captain for the Valorant esports team at college. Naturally, I have spent a fair while in traditional aim trainers to get better at clicking heads however when I was trying to go for a record in one of my favorite VR games I found myself not being able to aim very effectively as I haven't played VR for a while. So I spent a bit of time looking for a good game to train my aim for these intense battles but everything I found didn't look good or crashed when I opened them, so I took it upon myself to make my own.</p>
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<p>I had never made any VR games before and I didn't know how well godot could handel VR but to my surprise it was worked very well. Thankfully a lot of the work had been done by the <a href="https://github.com/GodotVR/godot_openxr">Godot Open-XR</a> team which had all the boilerplate code ready and worked right out the box with loads of documentation. Within my first day I already had a MVP of the game and in this video you can see me messing around and testing it out.</p>
<p>I had made a handful of traditional 3D games so some of my skills would translate to VR game development but I was faced with a handful of issues so far. The biggest issue is making a good GUI for the game as I had to take into account they can't just take off their headset to use a keyboard and mouse and had to design it so you could physically point and click.</p>
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<p><img src="/assets/SettingsBoardV1.png" alt="Describe what is in this image"></p>
<p><img src="/assets/SettingsBoardV2.png" alt="Describe what is in this image"></p>
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<p>In my first 2 attempts at this GUI, I was still learning about the correct way to make GUI and the fact that I made them overly blocky and huge to account for the use of VR made them very ugly but it was a good starting point to get my ideas down.</p>
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<p><img src="/assets/SettingsBoardV3.png" alt="Describe what is in this image"></p>
<p><img src="/assets/SettingsBoard2V3.png" alt="Describe what is in this image"></p>
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<p>Next, my friend who specializes in website and GUI design and creation made these GUI alongside me to teach me how to make better websites and GUI overall. This was a big step and allowed me to create a better GUI in future games and laid the foundation knowledge to design this website you are on right now!</p>
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<p><img src="/assets/ScenarioSelectorV4.png" alt="Describe what is in this image"></p>
<p><img src="/assets/GameSettingsV4.png" alt="Describe what is in this image"></p>
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<p>These were my final designs for VR that incorporated the good practices and designs from my friend's creation alongside my ideas and then optimized them for VR gaming. I then began the tedious part of actually coding them into my game. I Love the Godot Game Engine but I do hate how you create GUI and I wish I could just write it in React or HTML as that is what I am more used to now.</p>
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<p><img src="/assets/VRAddTasks.PNG" alt="Describe what is in this image"></p>
<p><img src="/assets/VRTasks.PNG" alt="Describe what is in this image"></p>
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<p>One of the biggest things for me when coding up this GUI was to make it as expandable as possible. When looking back on some of my older projects such as my Dungeon Resurgence I can see how hard it would be to maintain the code and add more and more items later on. I wanted to have as many “scenarios” as possible and to have the ability to make your own just like Kovvaks. So I opted to make all my GUI dynamic, one of the ways I did this was to add each scenario to the GUI list as it was loaded from a JSON file, you can see a part of the code in these screenshots.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/VRGun.PNG" alt="Describe what is in this image"></p>
<p>For most of my other projects I havent attempted to stick to my naming conventions and overcomplicating parts of the game that doesnt need to be over complicated, for example this gun has been simplified as much as possible with all extra things removed and I have stuck to using pascal-case for my node naming.</p>
<p>Unfortunately this game is only half way to being done at the time of writing but I have been documenting every step as I like to make YouTube content about things I do and wanted to try make some videos on game development. These videos would also act as some kind of marketing for the games I create so more people would play them when I upload them on itch.io.</p>


A VR aim trainer after I could not find a good one on Steam. 

Dungeon Resurgence

A full game made for a college assignment which is fully documented.

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Time Spent:

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Other projects

The Walking Stead

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VR Aim Trainer

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