Rust Valley

Gameplay screenshots

Start Screen and Options Menu

Pause Menu

Original sketches planning out the concept for our game. A lot of environmental features were influenced by traditional Islamic architecture.

First draft of "looping" map.

Rust Valley is a collaboration with five other students. The game is a 3D third-person shooter game with endless hordes of enemies. The objective of the game is to survive for as long as possible. The further a player progresses in the game, the more areas they can discover. However, the further they progress, the more difficult the waves become, with new bosses being sent to track down and eliminate the player. Rust Valley takes place on an alien desert planet where the player is an intruder that the inhabitants are fighting against.

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After we had finalized the concept for our game, I began building several different drafts for the level design. The map for our game was the area of most complication for our game, as it went through almost a dozen different changes to make room for new building designs, boss battles, and abilities we introduced for our character. It was also important that each zone of the map had a clear distinction from the others, so these areas provided benefits or disabilities when fighting against the hordes. This is when we introduced the idea of "gates" that would unlock to each area. This would encourage the player to live longer to unlock new areas, many of which would provide them with environmental benefits and power-ups.

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As I worked on editing our map layout, I began coding and implementing some basic UI features, such as the start and end screens. The look of these two screens were inspired by designs from our environment designer. We often collaborated on our designs so we would have a unifying design and aesthetic across our game. These static screens (start, end, pause, options) have a rustic, desert, militaristic look to them. The in-game features, such as the score display and text pop-ups have a more futuristic design to them to give the impression that these are stats seen through our robot player's eyes. To emphasize the futuristic technology of our player, we opted to include diegetic UI for our health bars, giving the impression that these are displays coming from the player's armor.

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