Medusa

Medusa is a game created by Luis Lairet, Brian Pike, Jim Casale, and myself during Structures of Game Production at Full Sail University. Medusa is the name of an underwater facility that has been infested with mutated sea creatures. It's up to the player to eliminate the threat and escape the facility. Over the course of two months, we developed the tools and the engine that run this network capable 4 player co-op shooter. The game was created with the use of C++ and DirectX.

Navigating the dark passaegways

Responsibilities

I worked on the level editor for the game. More on that in this post. Since I worked on the level editor and was familiar with it, I handled loading the levels that were created in the editor into the game engine. This involved loading the various tile images used to create the level, the spawn points for the players, the triggers for the enemies to be created, the position and color of the lights, as well as numerous other triggers and objects. During the optimization phase, I also implemented culling on the map, so the tiles that weren't currently on screen wouldn't be rendered.

Dropping a turret for some backup

I was in charge of creating two of the characters in the game. The scout, who has a sprinting ability and a shotgun that sprays in a spread pattern, and the engineer, who only has a pistol as a weapon, but can drop down a turret for some added support. During the creation of the characters, I also implemented the shooting, so the bullets come from the tip of the gun towards the crosshair. I also came up with a method to randomize the shotgun spray so it behaved like a real shotgun, spreading shrapnel in a random pattern, and implemented the targeting for the turrets.

Getting mauled

As I mentioned before, I handled some of the triggers in the game. With some help from Luis, we were able to create triggers that could change some of the lighting effects. At times in the game, the lights will flicker, go dim and into various other modes, adding some suspense to the game. The enemies are also triggered when players enter a certain area and removed at certain points to keep the enemy count down.

Priming a grenade

I also helped find and create many of the assets in the game. I helped out in adding some of the sound effects, like the shotgun blast and footsteps. My main contribution as far as assets go was creating the HUD and the level artwork. While I'm not much of an artist with pen and paper, I can work my way around Photoshop pretty well. For the HUD and the level artwork, I mixed and matched countless textures, colors and patterns together to create levels that looked unique, as well as infested. Since I created the level editor and was very familiar with it, I also created three of the four levels in the game.

Showing off some cool lighting

This project was, by far, my favorite experience at Full Sail thus far. I got to work with three awesome guys and we were able to learn and create a ton of cool stuff during the two month class. I'd like to give some thanks to our associate producer Robert Martinez, as well as the extra guidance we had from Sean Hathaway, Shawn Paris, John O'Leske, Darryl Malcomb, Garry Miller, Lari Norri and anyone else I may be forgetting.