Portfolio Entry: Zombie Road [WIP]

Foreword
A collaborative project by me and Rasmus Welin done with UDK, Unreal Development Kit. I mainly handle all the code and Rasmus is in charge of of modelling, level editing etc. This post will represent the current state of the game and will be updated with time as new features are added to the game. For posts about the continued development on this game see the Zombie Road category.


Purpose
The purposes for doing this project are several.

• Having a proper game in my portfolio
• Gaining experience with Unreal Script
• Gaining more experience in general game programming, since prior experiences have been with low level implementations.

Concept

Zombie Road is a co-op first person shooter. It is inspired by Killing floor, Left 4 Dead and other first person Zombie shooters, but also things from games like Ultima Online when it comes to character progression. Rather than using the level system it will be based upon improvement of individual skillsets. It will not contain player vs player gameplay and will be purely focused on co-op survival.

Features & Technology
This is a list of features that currently exists in the game and any particular technologies used to implement them.

• Scaleform UI
  • Menus
  • HUD
• Persistent user data
  • User data is stored on GAE, Google App Engine (character progress etc). GAE is also used for the server listings for the server browser.
  • UDK's steam integration is used to fetch the player's account ID. This is what is used to keep track of unique players without the need of our own account logic.
• Server Browser
  • Implemented my own server browser with the help of GAE and scaleform. The servers are posted to and fetched from a GAE datastore and presented in a scaleform menu.
• Wave based gameplay
• Waves are easily configured in the UDK editor so you can specify things like:
• Wave count
• Amount of mobs for each wave (goal condition)
• How many mobs are allowed to be spawned at any one time
• Types of mobs to spawn
• Frequency of mobs. Either by percent or a fixed number (for example 30% for certain mobs and that only 1 of a certain type of mob is allowed to be spawned (boss)

Media

Editing wave information in editor

Feel free to comment below.