Cyber Rescue: Virus Eruption
ABOUT
Cyber Rescue is a fast-paced 80's inspired synthwave arcade racer featuring intense and rewarding gameplay.
This was our first 3D game and was developed over 8 weeks parallel with developing our in-house 3D engine, Ugnen.
DETAILS
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Genre:
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Level editor:
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Engine:
Arcade Racer
Unity
Ugnen (in-house)
MY WORK
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Level design
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Game design
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Engine feature design
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Editor tools in C#
Whitebox in Unity
Level Editor
We built our levels using Unity. This was a project we made parallel to creating our own 3D engine, so we needed a level editor that was easy to use, customizable, and easy to export level data from.
With Unity our tools programmer could create editor scripts to export data to the engine, and I could create level design tools to improve our workflow.
Design Focus
My main focus for this project was to iterate on the second-to-second loop and make sure the game felt snappy, intense and rewarding.
Level design-wise this meant placing pickups in meaningful locations where the player was constantly faced with risk vs reward.
Game design-wise I put a lot of effort into making the pickups feel rewarding to collect. I designed the audio to make small pickups play incrementing sound effects following a chromatic scale, while the big pickup explode with rewarding sound and particle effects.
This made the players want to collect pickups in a sequence, and allowed us to control the level flow.
Mockup showing pickups
Spline (green line) leading the player
Design Problems
The game is played "on rails", meaning the game follows a fixed route while the player can only navigate vertically and horizontally relative to that route.
This came with some design problems. How do we telegraph to the player that they can't stray off from the path? What happens when an object blocks the player from the camera view?
A lot of my workload went into combating design issues like these and making sure that if we couldn't eliminate the problem completely, we could keep the player so occupied with focusing on the goal and having fun that the problems wouldn't break their immersion.
PROGRAMMING
Andy Stråhed
Hjalmar Danielsson
Ludvig Jare
Simon Eriksson
Lukas Hull
TECHNICAL ART
Robin Andblom
Valdemar Nyhlén
LEVEL DESIGN
Jacob Tjernström
Noel Toivio
Simon Isacsson Andersén
ANIMATION
Lina Einebrant
Max Larsson
ART
Emma Hugin
Fredrik Ämting
Simon Eimersson
MUSIC
Mitch Murder