Mardi Gras Madness
Mardi Gras Madness is an first person shooter developed in unreal engine 4, where the player’s goal is to escape the city after an outbreak happens. The main inspirations behind the game were Resident Evil and Silent Hill, because I enjoy that the key part of those games is finding objects to progress through the levels. The outbreak is your standard zombie apocalypse where the dead walk the earth but it’s set during Mardi Gras. This was my first fps game and my first time developing AI within unreal engine 4.
Design breakdown
Up, up, and away
When designing the gameplay mechanics for this game I wanted to include a grappling hook in this game. At the time of this game’s development I was playing dying light and was inspired by the mechanic. However I knew that it wouldn’t make sense to allow the player to grapple to any location in the level, instead I limited it to certain spots within the level. I would mark these spots for the player by adding some thematic lighting below it. Putting this limitation also allowed the level design to blocked out in a way that was felt natural.
Get ready
As for the main challenge of the game I took more a sophisticated approach to developing AI compared to previous take with Swamp Horror. The overall concept is the same the AI wanders between points and goes after the player on sight, but this time I used a navmeshes and a combination of Behavior trees and blueprints. Also you can fight back against these AI and they will react to being hit.
A game design document can be found here