First Person Survival Game

Computer science major built a fully-fledged prototype of a first-person survival game.

About the Project

Overview

As a semester-long independent project, advised by Prof. Stuetzle, Daniel Vadala built a full prototype of a first-person shooter and survival video game. The game was built using the Unity Game Engine, an industry-standard game engine used in professional game development. Dan imported original art assets (specifically the guns used in the game) that were developed by a friend of his, which required him to convert the art into object files to be used by Unity.

In the game, players have survived a plane crash, but they need to find the pieces of the plane that are missing in order to repair it. In addition, there are artificially intelligent robots hunting them down. Players need to find materials to survive, fight off the enemy bots, and assemble the pieces of the plane. All of this takes place in a fully designed world, full of terrain features, trees, and water.

As part of the development process, Daniel analyzed the fundamental ideas of “play” and “fun” to develop a prototype that takes the user experience into account as much as possible.