Cyber City
Open-world Stealth Action
What is it?
What's the backstory?
March 2019
During DAGD's Spring Break Jam, I developed a first-person-shooter, infiltration-themed prototype called "Cyber Shot".
March - May 2019
Students studying level design created a premise, setting, and backstory for a game called "Project Extinction". Students then collaborated to build 1 large map, many contributing Blueprints and art content to the project.
Fall 2020
This fork of the project was re-re-branded as "Cyber City". A new cohort of level design students wrote all new lore for a new city. Then students broke into teams to design and block-out districts of the city.
Meanwhile, students from DAGD 310, taught by Jacob Pollak, designed user interfaces for the game.
Spring 2021
I continued bugfixing and merging content. I've been dividing the city up into chunks, and redistributing all of the 15,000ish Actors across dozens of map files. I've been working on fixing and integrating broken user interfaces.
Students in DAGD 260, taught by Jacob Pollak, created branding and marketing materials for the game.
What did I contribute?
At first, the project was a way for me to explore the following mechanics:
- A weapon system with raycast weapons, homing projectiles, "hacking" projectiles and other interesting abilities.
- A shader that uses the lets the player see enemies and hidden threats -- even through walls.
- A shader that creates animated holograms. The shader has many parameters so students can use it in different ways around the city.
- Engaging AI, hidden trip wires, and systems that allow communication between AIs.
- A fun jetpack and other aerial abilities!
- Moody sci-fi lighting and emissive materials
In Fall 2020, I redeveloped some of the game's systems, including jetpack, aerial takeoff, improving AI and adding an interactive terminal with world-space GUI.
Recently, I've been working on improving LODs, level-streaming, and overall just trying to stitch together and optimize all of the student content.
