Intro

Tech Cowboy is a shooter built in UE5 with a top-down view. It was created for Epic Games' 2023 Game Jam.

My role in the project was game designer and programmer. I handled the majority of the gameplay design (80%) and almost all of the programming (95%).

This was my first game jam and it was a great experience overall.

Brief

We set out to create a game that we thought we could reasonably finish within the deadline (1 week), given our lack of experience at this time, we decided on a simple game idea. The game also had to fit the theme 'Antiquated Future', our take on this was an alien invasion.

Our idea for the game was a cowboy that gets invaded by aliens and you have to try survive. The player's goals would be to upgrade their abilities and power using currency gained from killing enemies, and a long term goal of ending the invasion (we didn't implement this). To keep the players engaged, We wanted to rely on a fun feeling of gameplay through impactful hit sounds and VFX, and interesting uses of abilities.

Design Features

• Different enemy types with unique combat styles
• This is so the player could make meaningful decisions about what enemy to focus on (the explosive rushing enemy is more dangerous than the mid range projectile one).
• Dash movement ability
• To help with dodging enemies.
• This is important as the player dies to a single hit so having movement options gives the player some options to evade.
• Character upgrade system
• A way for the player to progress within a match, this gives players a goal to work towards.
• One of the upgrades is the laser ability, which added another way to fight. This ability felt nice to use and I think we should have leaned into the ability based combat more for some novelty.

User Feedback

We didn't get a lot of player feedback due to not many people playing the game, but the feedback we did get was related to the character being too small and hard to see, and enemies being hard to spot because of their shadows.

• Character/enemies hard to see
• To fix the character and enemies being hard to see, we could use a unique style/outline to them. Enemies could have a red outline, for example.
• We could also get rid of shadows completely, and use a small visual indicator under the player like a chevron or circle.

Learnings

• Getting user feedback is very important as it's easy to overlook things you've designed.
• Prototyping early would've helped me spot that the gameplay of shooting primarily gets boring and would've given me more time to work on adding abilities.

Next steps

I learnt a lot but I'm going to work on other projects and prototypes.