The goal of Dead Corps

Dead Corps was apart of the wider catalog of Spawnpoint games I helped design. Recognizing the inherent joy of mowing down progressively more enemies and being able to choose how you get those kills is what drove most decisions we made.

In addition each element of the game was designed to be easily scale-able as possible. This was to encourage replayability and a part of the wider design of Spawnpoint where players could unlock more in the games as they accrues game time.

The perk system

Before each wave the player is given a choice between three perks from a larger pool of perks. The perks have a wide array of effects including increasing weapon damage; healing the player and boasting the money earned. The aim was to make perks synergize together and reward the player for quick thinking.

One example of perks working together is one perk increased damage based on used ammo and another rewarded the player with ammo on each kill. This pushed the player towards a play style where they precisely aimed each shot. And with 24 total perks in the game it was unlikely each player would have the same build each time they played- resulting in a new play style each game.

The economy

Every kill in the game rewards the player with money, with bigger rewards given to headshot and special infected kills. The primary use of money is to buy guns from the vending machine. These guns allow the player to more conveniently rack up kills, earning them more money and allowing them to buy more powerful guns. This forms the basic game loops until the players face the boss.

The secondary use of money was to buy consumables like grenades, mystery boxes and weapon upgrades. Unfortunately due to time limits the mystery box and weapon upgrades were cut from the game. The grenades were one time use throwables that caused significant damage to enemies besides the boss.

The zombies

The normal zombies are the bulk of the enemies the players face, they have two walk speeds and were pretty easy to kill. The two walk speeds were added so that players could get accommodated with their weapon and environment during the first couple waves. A lesson learned from RE:COIL and how inexperienced players need adjustment time before being dumped into the deep end.

The special infected

The special infected make up the second largest group, each of the three special infected are designed to disrupt the player. This makes them important target to take out first otherwise you’ll have deal with there deadly mechanic.

The bloater is a large high health enemy. They act similarly to the normal zombie except if you kill him in anyway besides a headshot he explodes. This explosion distorts the players vision making it harder to see other threats and causes some pretty major damage.

The other two special infected zombies attack the player from range. The first being spitter who fires a ball of acid at a player upon making contact with a surface an AoE acid pool appears cause damage to any player that touches it. This can block off vital parts of the map or deal passive damage to a distracted player.

The final special is the priest who launches their tongue at enemy unfortunate player in his line of sight. Upon contact the tongue wraps around the player causing consistent damage and causes their weapons to become far less accurate. The only ways to release a player from the tongue is by shooting it or the priest.

The special infected add another layer to the game and break up the monotony of shooting wildly down a hallway by adding important targets the player needs to deal with.

The Boss

The boss is the final threat at the end of the game. It creates a final hurdle the players must come together to face. I concepted a couple varieties of bosses - but due to time constraints the final game only includes one the Tank. Taking inspiration from the Tank from Left 4 Dead and the Rioter from Killing floor 2.

The main gimmick of the Dead Corps Tank is a number of weak spots covering them. Attacks made to weak spots do increased damage for a limited amount of time before they are destroyed. Destroyed weak spots increase the bosses attack speed and movement speed, turning him from a lumbering giant to angry gorilla. This was received quite well by players as helped create a building threat

The Tank had a number of attacks to threaten the players with; be it charging through the playspace; throwing projectiles or even just pummeling an annoying player directly. Each of the attacks were designed to disrupt players and force them to move around the playspace at the risk of taking damage or dying. This help counter act the rigid movement some novice VR gamers suffer from - and allowed us to take full space given from Arena scale VR.

Level Design

A restriction with Arena scale VR is that the arena has a maximum size that corresponds to the room you are physically in. To combat this we picked three common sizes that all maps would fit. The maps were made so that all 3 sizes would exist in the same scene with a dynamic set of barriers that could block off the different sizes of maps and the larger exterior environments. This allowed for all 3 sizes to be developed simultaneously without any disruptions to quality or version maintenance. As a byproduct a player who experiences the game in a smaller arena would have an identical one in a larger arena.

A portion of my time was spent on making sure the zombies could path across any environment they were in. As it was vital that the players had something to fight and not just a series of static targets.

Working with asset packs

During the project I was put in charge of locating asset packs with similar art styles to help reduce the work load that would be placed on the Art team. Naturally not all assets were able to be sourced so I provided guidance to the art team while the created player models, weapon reload animations and the special infected/boss. I also personally worked tweaking some of the weapon assets to make them more visually interesting in first person.