Chromakill

Chromakill is a 3D first person shooter and platformer in Unity that revolves around quick movement and aim, with online leaderboards to compete with other player's times. The player picks a selection of movement abilities that they use to optimize a route through nine different levels. The gameplay consists of using grapples, dashes, jumps, and teleports to defeat every enemy and reach the exit as fast as possible.

What I Did: 

Chromakill was created as the semester-long project for MI498 Collaborative Game Design in spring 2024. I worked with a ten person team with guidance from professors and an MSU alumni team currently working at Bungie. Our team used long-term burndown charts to organize sprints and prioritize the most important tasks. We began by making a functional prototype in the first week where I implemented movement systems and game systems. Once we had that down, I worked heavily on fine-tuning the movement and developing movement ability prototypes such as the double jump, dash, grapple, and teleport knife. I created some design tools to help create levels faster by assigning objects scripts needed to interact with game mechanics, and we created level prototypes and cut down to our best levels.

In order to address some issues our game had with its aesthetic, I developed the light grenade mechanic. I made tweaks to physics and UX following extensive playtesting as well. I mostly managed the user playtesting and feedback forms and created systems in-game to report feedback to a google form. Once we had the gameplay solid, I worked on improving UI and sound implementation. I worked on a system to easily play sounds and music from objects with spatial audio.

What I Learned: 

The smartest thing we did on this project was create a prototype in the first week. Building our project around that basis helped our team understand what we were working on. However, because of this, we sometimes fell into the danger of planning too many unnecessary features, and not enough necessary features. One piece of feedback from a professor was particularly helpful for this issue, where he mentioned our game's thesis should be "A game that is A and B, and therefore needs C, and therefore needs D..." etc. Any mechanic we added afterwards had a clear reason why we were adding it to the game.

I also picked up a lot of neat tricks in the realm of Unity tools creation, and a lot of UI implementation and design concepts. We struggled a bit with making mechanics obvious to users, but eventually made progress by making redundant game systems to ensure players figure out key information. By the end of the semester, we had a game that I believe was the most fun game I've worked on, and easily my favorite project. The game was presented at the MSU Spring 2024 Games Showcase and we were awarded with "Best Gameplay."

For more info, or to play the game: Download the game on the Itch.io page!