Catnip Kingpins

First Person Shooter Roguelike (Personal Project)              June 2023 – August 2023

Level Designer/ Product Owner / Systems Designer          Team Size: 12 

Responsibilities: Documentation, Mechanics Concepting, Level Design, Lighting

Overview

Catnip Kingpins is a First Person Shooter Roguelike in which the player traverses randomly selected pre-built rooms, and beat the challenges presented to them in order to progress. The goal of the player is to complete all randomly selected rooms in order to take down the cat mafia, while collecting upgrades along the way. The game was produced over 8 weeks in order to build a proof of concept. The section presented in game  is a night time city-suburban landscape, with interconnecting alleyways. The player is given a simple upgrade system and a selection of 6 different guns in order to conquer the 2D enemies in the 3D environment! 

Map Gallery

Postmortem

Learning Experiences – City Layouts, Systems Communication, Working with Environment Artists 

In the earliest stages of development I was extremely excited about creating a city layout, but later realized how much time it took to keep a city layout look both realistic and functionable as an arena to fight in. It took a lot of time to design layouts, and was struggling greatly with general blockouts early on. The initial communications with the programmers got a little messy as the documentation wasn’t extremely specific. A railgun that was concepted for the programmers wasn’t properly described and ended up less as a railgun, and more of a trace rifle from Destiny 2. I also had never worked with an environment artist before, so I was extremely excited to learn how to communicate with them to make a real level from scratch! 
 
Solutions / Takeaways – City Research and Experimentation, Clearer Docs / Ideas

I learned an absolute ton about overall city designs, and played around a lot in engine in order to get ideas. I went to google maps, and looked at cities in order to find top down examples of what I might be looking for, and roughly copied some while changing the layout of some things. It helped give me pointers and show how useful of a tool something like google maps is, and how important real life information / architecture is. 

I learned to go very in depth about mechanics and general communications with teammates, because I had assumed as a designer that everyone knew what a railgun was, however the programmer making the weapon had never heard of one before, so they researched and made something else based off a guess. It made me realize I need to ask more about people’s personal game experiences and general knowledge, as well as make extremely concise documentation. I also really enjoyed having artists to work with! I learned how to communicate with them over an art asset list, and learned what key terms and things I should mention when describing what I need from them. Documentation and meetings were very handy for clarification. I had so much fun overall!

 
 

Documentation