Zombie Ops Arcade – Nawaf Alotaishan – Flora Weil
For our final project we still wanted to make a game as our main genre of interaction, of course we wanted to evolve past our mid-term project, so we brainstormed some ideas of what the game was going to be while trying to satisfy the requirements of using both Arduino and Processing4. We decided to create a top-down shooter. Our initial inspiration was the game asteroids, but we also wanted to make our own twist. In our user testing we only had the fundamental mechanics of the game finished so a lot of the feedback judged our vision a lot while we hoped for more technical advice since what we had was still a very early work in-progress. But thankfully we did get some tech feedback especially on how the look analog stick was resetting instead of maintaining the direction after release.
Later on, as the project progressed we wanted to shift the identity of our game and we were also fans of horde shooters so we pivoted to a zombie apocalypse theme. The idea of the game is to create a PVE wave-based horde shooter with an unlimited number of waves that progressively get harder. We created two enemy types: the blob enemy that subdivides and the basic zombie enemy. We also had four powerups in the game: speed, double points, rapid fire, and nuke. These mechanics were inspired by call of duty zombies but transformed into a 2D game.
We wanted to create a laser-cut arcade cabinet and controller to go along with it. Our idea was to slot a tablet into the cabinet to act as the arcade screen. We found a svg template online of a small wood laser-cut cabinet but we had to heavily modify the design and simplify it to fit our screen and our purpose. The controller shell was made from scratch and we were satisfied with its dimensions, however we encountered a lot of obstacles with creating a proper mount for the analog sticks using 3d printed parts and the classic button problem of struggling to mount a button in-place. Ultimately, we had to sacrifice a lot of the buttons and only implement the basic shooting button as the only input for the game. In hindsight we shouldn’t have tried to reinvent the wheel by creating a controller from scratch especially since we didn’t have the level of 3d modelling skills to pull it off successfully. We should’ve opted for using an off the shelf controller.
I believe we achieved our goals of creating a top-down survival wave-shooter game. Even though some features of the game had to be cut due to time constraints such as more enemy types and cooldown abilities. The audience was able to quickly get familiar with the controls and enjoyed the game. It was very satisfying to see people test our game in the IMA Show. Here is a link to our code