Tomato's Guns

Trailer for Tomato' Guns.

Description

Tomato's Guns is a Metroidvania-style FPS in which the player can use three different weapons' stimulus system to both defeat their enemies and bolster their movement options.

This project was made in our Directed Research course on Advanced Unity Architecture and Scalability, where we sought to research scalability and large project organization, while pursuing systemic and emergent gameplay in our design.

The game is available to download and play here: https://sheehanahmed.itch.io/tomatos-guns

My Role as Designer

  • Collaborated with art lead on concept art for weapons, enemies, levels, and overall aesthetic.
  • Developed mechanics for weapons and enemy AI with engineering team.
  • Documented and maintained a Notion wiki, presentations on enemy and weapon designs, and a design developer diary.
  • Grayboxed all platforming and combat challenges using ProBuilder that take advantage of the game’s movement/mechanics/enemies.

Design Examples

Mobirise

Some Drill and Sentry enemies.

Enemy Design

For our enemies, we had some overarching goals:
1) They needed to be simple - simple enough to create, code, and for players to understand them.
2) They needed to be different enough from each other, in their visuals, behaviors, and type of threat that they posed.
3) They had to be manageable with the different kinds of weapons in the game.

With our foundations agreed on, I worked with the team to design two enemies. The first was a sentry-type enemy that would chase the player, take a standing position and fire, and reposition if the player was out of sight or range. The second was a charging enemy that would wind up and charge at the player in a fairly linear path. The two enemy types allowed for interesting combinations of enemies and spaces, and complimented our weapons well.

Mobirise

An example of our weapons working together would be Mine Gun -> Force Gun.

Weapon Design

For the weapons, we wanted them to complement each other well in systemic ways, inspired by Breath of the Wild's massive possibility space for iterations between different abilities and elements. For the scope of our project, we split up damage from weapons to additionally carry either a concussive or freeze stimuli. We chose concussive and freezing stimuli due to our emphasis on player movement and 

With the two stimuli decided on, the weapons designed were:
1) A Mine Gun that fires up to 3 sticky mines, that could be detonated to deal damage and explosive stimuli.
2) A Freeze Gun that could freeze enemies in their tracks, allowing for crowd control and setups with other weapons.
3) A Force Gun that could push enemies (or boost the player) with a concussive blast, or pull them in by firing a gravity orb.

The weapons were designed to allow for different kinds of setups depending on the situation and environment. For fighting on cliffs, you could potentially (freeze and) push the enemies off the ledge. For close quarters, you could fire a gravity orb to pull in all the enemies, and take them out with a few mines. The Force Gun in particular allowed for boosted jumps if the player fired it while aiming at their feet, allowing for increased movement options as well as quick escapes from combat.

Mobirise

I wanted the level to best highlight the weapons' uses in and out of combat.

Level Design

As one of my first 3D level design roles, this was a learning experience in both designing levels as well as learning about the tools used for it. As this was a Unity-based project, I learned a lot about ProBuilder's features, with my leaning experience facilitated by my prior background in 3D modeling in Maya. 

My goal for the level design was for it to best highlight the weapons' uses, both in and out of combat. Areas like a cliff ledge would have combat encounters with enemies placed in a manner that would encourage players to use their weapons to push them off. Likewise individual platforms with enemies could be dealt with from a distance with the Mine Gun, or a more experienced player could run in with the Force Gun and feel like a badass!

For the movement options in our game, I wanted the level design to allow the player to explore and combine all of the options at their disposal. Some sections had specific wall-running sections to deal with enemies from above, other sections had platforming to let our dashes, jumps and boosts to really shine.

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