Death Switch
May 31 2020 - June 28 2020
This was a month-long project where we I was given a specific theme to try to create a game around. The theme for this month was "Playing Both Sides".
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My first thought when given this theme was that I had no idea what to do to fit this. I tried to think of what kind of games "played both sides" and I tried thinking of two different sides to even use, yielding no results. At one point in my thinking, I took a break. I was conversing with some friends and family, and suddenly I remembered Black Ops II. I remembered there was some sort of map or game mode where when you died, you became a spirit, and then could levitate around, shoot electricity, and even revive yourself for up to 60 seconds. I believe the game mode was called Mob of the Dead. I just remembered thinking how cool it was when I played it, that you could switch between basically being dead and being alive. And so Death Switch was born.
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I didn't want to directly copy Mob of the Dead by any means, but that would've also been way out of a scope for a one-month, solo project. I just wanted to use the same mechanic essentially. However, with Death Switch you had to hit a light switch that would take your character in between being alive and being dead. While your character was dead, you could go through walls to find keys and switches to open doors and try to escape. Unfortunately because the project was only a month long I couldn't quite get it to look how I wanted as I had a bad habit of being a little over ambitious with certain ideas.
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To be completely honest, this is one project that even after submitting it, I've always wanted to come back to it and make it bigger and polish it up more and maybe one day be able to publish it as an indie developer. I have not given up this idea and don't plan to. I hope that if you download and play it you will enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed creating it. Throughout this page you will find my Game Design Document with the idea and playtests for Death Switch. You will then also find the download for the game at the top of the page and the Postmortem questions at the bottom.
Death Switch Game Design Document with Playtests
Here you will see the Game Design Document with recorded playtests for Death Switch throughout the time of its creation.
Skills Used
Unreal Engine
Blueprint Scripting
Playtesting
Level Design
Game Design
Game Design Documenting
Postmortem
Q: What challenges did you overcome in the previous month?
A: I hadn't done a lot of work with the Unreal Engine prior to this project so it was a challenge to figure out how to make the game and create the mechanic I wanted to use for it. Figuring out how to allow the character to pass through certain walls was a bit of a difficulty but I felt quite accomplished once I found a solution.
Q: What challenges did you fail to overcome?
A: I think overall for this project I got a little too ambitious for what I really wanted it to be. I wish I could have input more polished features or animations to make it look better before the turn in date. However, this is one of the project I still plan on working on and eventually publishing.
Q: What is something related to the project that you feel could have gone better?
A: Something I feel could have gone better in terms of the project was the basics. Somehow in the creation of the game, I believe I forgot to program the escape key to quit the game. Which feels small but to me it feels like it makes the project look unfinished or not real and it makes me feel bad when I think of people downloading it and playing it and having to use their window key in order to "x" the window of the game or to have to die to hit the quit button.
Q: What is something related to the project overall that you feel went well?
A: I feel overall that the project in itself went well for having only one month to create it from the Game Design Document and Playtests all the way to the actual game itself and constantly trying to update it based on critiques. I feel accomplished overall for having made it with an engine I had little to no experience with prior.
