Description
Boneyard Brawler is a 3D party game where you need to knock your friends off the platform to win! Each player starts off as a basic skeleton fighter, but at the game progresses body parts from various monsters will begin to spawn on the playing field. The goal is to mix and match your parts so that you can be the last monster standing. Things get pretty crazy when everybody has different body parts, so do your best to equip the right combination of parts to get the job done.
Background
This game was developed for my Senior Showcase Project (2020) with a large team of artists and coders. This was honestly a great group experience for working with quite a few people. There were quite a few moving parts in this project, and progressing from concept creation to implementation was quite a journey. I was tasked with designing stages, Shaders, and particle effects during this project. Stage design was a big portion of this project, and I learned quite a few lessons trying to design a 3D space with a limited camera view.
My Role
Like I mentioned above, I was very involved in the level design and visual portion of the game. We made quite a few prototype levels and we had a great time with those early levels. Then all of that was basically torn down and built up again through playtesting. Quite a few of our early iterations of stages were constantly rehashed to give players a better visual field and to evoke their sense of what they considered fun about our stages. The main stages I was involved in was the “dining room”, the “lounge” and the “bridge. We had a very talented 3D artist do a good portion of the level sculpting after our greybox portion, and she filled the levels with her lovely 3D models.
Other than the levels I designed quite a few of the visual effects and shaders for the game. Every hit, explosion, flying spooky thingy, was created by me. I had a lot of fun creating the visual effects for this game, and I got to dive pretty deep into unity’s particle system and discovered quite a bit in the process. I also got to play around with the Amplify Shader Editor, as a tool that our team was allowed to purchase (we had a 300$ budget that our school allowed us to have for the project). I created a few unique shaders like, the water shader, and the unique grass/dirt shader for the graveyard scene. I do eventually want to start creating more shaders for materials and the like, but I was overall satisfied with what I managed to put into this game.