Genre: Choreographed Vertical Shooter
Roles: Level Designer
Engine: Unity
Development Time: September 2009 – April 2010
Requiem is a game based on Mozart’s final mass by the same name. As such we used his work for the musical soundtrack to the game. Everything in the game is choreographed to play in sync with the music. The player begins the game as a retired military inventor commissioned one last time to destroy the power source that fuels all the war machines in the world. As the player makes their way through the game they will play levels that are choreographed to Mozart’s “Requiem”.
I was the Level Designer on Requiem. So it was my job to choreograph all the attacks, flybys, events, etc. This was a challenging, but rewarding, job for me for two reasons. One it was all scripting based and two I was forced to not only think of ways to choreograph enemy movement and firing patterns to work in unison with a song but to keep it from being too challenging to the player. This was an interesting challenge for me because most of my level design experience up until this point had been focusing on environmental challenges that a single or multiple players could overcome and not enemy based obstacles.
The goal of the game is to destroy each of the bosses as well as the machine that powers all their technology. Each individual level has it’s own goals. The first level being to stop the bomber from destroying the city (If you can), the second level is just to survive, and the third level is a large boss battle where you must defeat the flying fortress.
This project also provided me with another set of skills/challenge to my abilities. Before this project all of my level work had been in placing of objects and obstacles in a level. Mostly moving things around this way and that way, occasionally I would script something like a door opening. However, in this project there was no visual placement of objects like in Unreal or other editors similar to that. Everything I did had to be done via scripting. Which as I said was a challenge to me at first but I had done scripting for UI design and interfaces before. So I was luckily able to take those scripting skills and use them to quickly learn how to script the enemies and make the levels you see today.
The final outcome of Requiem, is a prototype. We were able to complete the first 3 levels of the game and create a solid playable prototype. During the Senior Show where the seniors showcase their work for family, friends, and complete strangers multiple people commented on liking this project the best and after the end of the school year the Dean of the department that contains my major showed the game to the rest of the faculty and staff on campus to highlight how far our major is coming. So please download the game below if you desire and enjoy.
You may download the game HERE.