RUN, GUN, GURN!

A 1v1 First person shooter where you and a buddy select a character to duke it out in a fast paced, high intensity romp!

The Challenge:

Pitch, design, and create a game within a span of 28 weeks.

Design Goals:

Create a fast paced first person shooter with a unique hook.
Create a set of characters that use simple controls to pilot entirely different playstyles.
Create a game that is easy to pick up, but has a high skill ceiling.

My Team and My Role

The Team Purple Phoenix Games came together for our 2025 Sheridan College Capstone Project. Our job was to create a game in 28 weeks to simulate a studio environment. We would be working through the game design pipeline from beginning to end.

Role: Lead Game Designer, Programmer

Game Design - The Core Gameplay Loop

My Responsibility:

I was in charge of creating the core gameplay loop. At the start of the production, before we nailed our art style or our full mechanics, we wanted to decide how the game would play. I decided that I wanted to create a 1v1 first person hero shooter, one where each character has their own unique weapons and abilities.

Learned Lessons:

I. Most features that involve characters, and moment to moment gameplay were designed by me. Here's a list of some of my proudest designs:

Player Movement
- Worked with another programmer to design and create a movement system that included wall running, pole vaulting, and sliding.
Player Weapons
- Created a modular system where each character could be equipped with a weapon without coupling issues.
Player Upgrades
- Designed a system for organizing and applying upgrades to the player character. Additionally, I programmed 6 unique upgrades for each character.

Designing For Tech in an Unfamiliar Engine

The Issue

This new engine provided a lot of promise, a lot of the new technologies allowed us to bypass some of the early pitfalls of creating our and since most of the team already had some familiarity with game engines, we decided that Unreal Engine would be the best one for our game to become a reality. However, once we were actually in the engine, we found that many of the programming commands we learned for other engines appeared in a very different form within Unreal Engine 5, and many of the designs that we had created would need to be modified to fit this new engine.

Changing our Design Approach

We had to change the way we were creating mechanics. During our initial conceptualization of the game, we were trying to communicate it in a very technical way, and discussed mechanics in terms of how to program them rather than how to design them for players. Our lack of familiarity with Unreal engine 5 had us change the way that we would design our mechanics. Here's how our process looked:

Before Restructure:

Write down a fleshed out mechanic with metrics and a complete description of how it must work.
Code it to the best of your abilities.
Test and see what needs to be tuned.
Return to the GDD and update with the changes that you've made.

This structure worked for some time, but the rigidity of the guidelines often meant that our metrics were the problem, and we would have to constantly go back to the Game Design Document (GDD) and redo the mechanic and log the new metrics. This slowed progress and made it so that we ignored other issues for longer since we would have to continue jumping through self imposed hoops.

After Restructure:

Write down a mechanic, a description of how the mechanic works, and your design intention.
Code it to the best of your abilities.
Test and see what needs to be tuned.
Apply changes to the ability and let the team know.

This new mode of operating, while it did have the weakness of not always being properly communicated to teammates, it allowed many of our mechanics to evolve as the game progressed. Using our GDD as a guideline rather than as our gospel really allowed us to go out there with some of our mechanics. Once we were happy with the final design, we would update the GDD with the most updated mechanic.

Programming

Weapons

I programmed both the Melee attack and the gun that appear in the game!

Abilities

I programmed each ability for each character within the game!

Upgrades

I created six unique upgrades to each character's abilities.

Modular Characters

I used a single script as the basis for all our characters, learning how to modulate universal attributes and diverge when needed.

Item Pickups

I programmed items that can be picked to restore their life, refill their ammo, or increase their speed.

Multiplayer

I created the initial multiplayer framework that was iterated on by my fellow programmers.

LevelUp 2025: Learning to Market, and Managing Post Launch Technical Difficulties

Run, Gun, GURN came to LevelUp 2025. A convention where aspiring developers from universities and other walks of life come together to showcase their games and compete with other games to based on a few categories. We entered our game to be judged based on its Technical Achievement and its Artistic Achievement.

Before the convention, we were told that we would be supplied a gaming PC and a Monitor. Our team assumed that the PC would include a keyboard and mouse to be able to use the computer, yet we were displeased to find that there would be no such thing. we were stranded at the convention without a way to boot or reset our game.

I can't stress enough how important Team Culture and Good Relationships are. Aside from developing the game, our team spent a lot of time creating a culture of Kindness, approach-ability, and helpfulness. We wanted to be more than just helpful to ourselves, and spent a lot of time with other teams playtesting and assisting them wherever we could. This made it easy to search for help, many teams were more than happy to loan us a spare keyboard or mouse whenever we needed them. It's important to create those good relationships because people will come to you in your time of need if you go to them in theirs.