Distress Signal
About the Project
Distress Signal is a Sci-Fi themed, top-down shooter where the player has to fight their way through a hostile ship, killing and looting all in their path. Randomised spawns, enemies and items ensure each playthrough will be unique in its own way.
CREATED USING
Unreal Engine
GENRE
Top Down Shooter
PLATFORMS
Windows
The game is a collaborative creation by second and third year students from Staffordshire University, with my role in the project as Lead Designer.
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My responsibilities included creating game and character mechanics, item and pickup design, level designing, creating design documentation, QA Testing and bug reporting.
Along with this, I also performed project management tasks through Jira, creating and assigning tasks to junior members of the design team, ensuring they always had stuff to do during each sprint. I also made sure to keep communication lines open with the other Leads on the project (tech, art, animation) to ensure we’re on target with our deadlines.
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Below is a PDF of some of the documentation I produced during the project, as well as my level design plans.
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GALLERY
LEVEL DESIGN
I designed this level with the thought of having each room be a different shape, rather than just having multiple square/rectangle rooms, as to hopefully make the game feel less repetitive as the player progresses throughout. Therefore, I incorporated various types of rooms from small ones suited to close quarters combat, to big open rooms for large scale fights, as well as, various tight confined corridors.
The player starts the level on Floor 1 (Engineering), and works their way up through to Floor 2 (Crew’s Quarters), all the way up to Floor 3 (Bridge), where a final boss fight will take place.
When it came to the interior layout and design, I took inspiration from ships such as the Normandy from Mass Effect, and the Player Character ships from Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Along with the top down level plans, I created some moodboard style posters which show my level design along with some screenshots of similar looking areas from other games that have inspired me.
Floor 1 (WIP)
Floor 2
Floor 3
