Railgun
Level Designer/Documentation | Team of 10 | Spring 2023
Railgun is a 2.5D roguelike shooter that takes place on a train in space. In this technologically advanced, magical, steampunk world the engineer of the train must fight their way to the engine room of the train to stop the alien entity that has taken over the train.
This project came about as part of the Game Studio program at Champlain college, in the class Studio 2. Railgun was worked on over the course of two semesters, first with a team of 5, then later onboarding more members including myself. Projects in this class were developed over the course of 12 weeks, with each week acting as an individual "sprint", where we set goals and delegate to maximize workflow.
As a designer on this team, my responsibilities included:
- Creating and designing mass amounts of levels to maximize replayability
- In-depth documentation of brainstormed player upgrades
- Balance and bug testing for enemies and upgrades
- Creation and implementation of lighting that adheres to existing game lore
Game Summary
Railgun is a 2.5D roguelike shooter on a magical steampunk train in space. Play as the last remaining engineer and fight off an alien threat that has infiltrated the train and knocked it off course! Battle through your foes, collect upgrades, and make it to the front of the train to retake control before it flies into the sun. Players gather numerous powerups to face off against the seven different types of alien enemies and three separate boss battles.
Technical
Railgun was developed in Unity, making use of Git version control to manage the project. The team kept up with Agile practices using Redmine as our project manager. We had frequent team and discipline meetings to stay on course.
Jane Smith's Professional Website
My Role
As a designer on Railgun, it was my job to document all prospective upgrades for the roguelike aspects of the game. This ensured that there was no lapse in communication of mechanics or other ideas between the designers and programmers in our group as to what the idea for the game would be moving forward. After this, it became my responsibility to crank out levels. As a roguelike game, a lot of the content comes from replayability, which we knew would be stale with the same levels over and over again, so myself and the other level designer together cranked out 50+ levels to be randomly selected from each time someone plays Railgun. This helped to keep the game fresh as no run was the same.
Lastly, it became my responsibility to create the lighting system. We wanted to have the lighting show the different stages of the story and lore, which is that a hostile alien species has taken over the space train and is steering it towards the nearest star. The lighting system I created reflected this in its angles and color. I created a sun to place in the background, and placed pointlights to give it orange backglow as well as to have "sunlight" bursting into the train from windows and doors. Through the 3 zones of the game, the interior lighting would fade due to the process the aliens were doing, and the lighting outside the train would become more intense/noticeable: Zone 1, the star is distant and lighting is normal. Zone 2, the star is noticeably bigger and the lighting is tinted orange as it pours into the room. Lastly, zone 3 has an intense sunset theme as the star is quite massive and visible just outside the windows.