Gunsect is a twin-stick shooter, where you shoot your way through hordes of enemies with a modular weapon to clear out a hive-like space station. With hundreds of gun combinations to choose from, the action is endless and the choices are yours to make.

During the production of Gunsect, which was my final major project during my two year degree at AIE Melbourne, I was tasked with being the Lead Designer, Systems Designer as well as the Level Designer.

Lead design

lead designer responsibilities:

Overseeing all aspects of the game, from player and enemy designs, to gameplay and level design

Working closely with the programmer, iterating upon various variables to get a tight and responsive character controller, camera controller and enemy AI

Concepting and designing all AI behaviours for each enemy variant; how they interact with the player, how they interact with the environment, total health per enemy

Being in charge of combat design; how it affects the gameplay, which module is given to each enemy and how that impacts the level

Clearly identify a strong sense of difficulty progression, rules amongst the levels, and ensuring the other level designers understand and build appropriate level grey boxes

Leading the systems design, concepting and designing all 23 player weapon modules, and 75+ enemy weapon modules

Playtesting all grey box levels provided by the other level designers, providing feedback and making sure the level structure and rules are universal across all levels

Ideating various player feedback aspects on the players HUD screen

Systems Design

systems design responsibilities:

Conceptualising and designing how each bullet type and elemental clip would operate, allowing them to work within the games levels and other systems

Creating and designing every module, trying to make each module as fun and exciting to play as the next, each with its core strength and weaknesses

Having to clearly differentiate each module in the same category, while keeping it balanced amongst other sections of the gun

Extensive playtesting all modules in an isolated scene, as well as it being paired with all other modules as part of the gun combination

Download the tool here

A large part of Gunsect is the modular weapon system, which allows the player to swap out each section of a 3 section weapon, with modules they will be given at random, at the end of each room.

Early on in development, to help me balance the weapon system and each individual module, I created a tool in Excel that allows me to easily plug in each modules stats and easily tweak it while seeing the direct effects.

This tool allows me to:

Time to kill on each enemy type, based on what module is plugged in, and whether or not its strong
Total damage per clip, including elemental damage and DPS per tick
Time to empty clip
Damage per second
Amount of bullets and reloads it takes to kill each enemy
See which modules work well together and why
A place to store all module, old and new

Level Design

Level design responsibilities:

Clearly identify a strong sense of difficulty progression, rules amongst the levels, and ensuring the other level designers understand and build appropriate level grey boxes

Playtesting and providing feedback for all grey box levels created by the other level designers. Ensuring each level layout fits the core rules set by myself

Tasked with placing enemies in all 15 pre-made levels provided by the other level designers. Testing the players skills through one core enemy weapon variant in each level, while also providing engaging and challenging gameplay

Ensuring the enemy placement and weapon modules given, coincide with the difficulty progression, and via vigorous playtesting, that new players can successfully finish each level without finding it too difficult

Create a final level that tests the skill of the player on all the games core mechanics. Utilizing all the core weapon modules, and summarizing the game in one final level.

Placing enough destructible creates to allow the player to heal, but also place them to guide the player around the map, and block off certain dead zones of the level