Halo: Flooded is a game I made in my favorite class so far, Structure of Game Design (SGD). SGD is first of 3 main "project" classes in Full Sail’s Game Development program. We were tasked to create an entire playable 2D game in one month. This was also an individual project, and I had the freedom of developing whatever game I wanted to make. A few of the requirements were:
- A very basic, 3 page design document of the features within the game
- Being able to shoot a projectile at enemies with real-time collisions
- Fullscreen or Windowed mode
- Savable options within an options menu
- Savable high score table
- Working event and message systems
- Switching between game states including in-game pause menu
- Cheat codes!
We had a list of optional features we were able to add to our game. Each feature had a point value and our game had to contain at least 20 points of these features to obtain full credit. I ended up with 53 feature points, a few of them are highlighted below:
- Stacked State System – 4 points
- Particle effects – 3 points
- Physics based movement – 2 points
- Anchor/Pivot point animations – 3 points
- XML scripts for loading data (other than options or high score) – 4 points
Ever since I started Full Sail I knew a project I wanted to work on would be an action based platformer/shooter. I played around with the idea a bit throughout earlier classes, and when I started in SGD, I knew that’s the type of game I wanted to work on. I wanted to create my own characters and storyline, but doing that would require much more time, and art assets would be an issue. I started on a search for sprites to use in my game, and I stumbled upon an awesome sprite sheet of Master Chief from the Halo universe. The sprite sheet was made by a guy named Innerrayg, and I thank him because I was able to piece together great animations, and it served as a direction for my game.
The only thing left to do was determine the gameplay. That became an easy decision, because around that time I was playing the Nazi Zombie mod for Call of Duty: World at War. With their round and point based progression, they were able to achieve very replayable gameplay, that was still simple enough for this type of project.
So my challenge was to create an action platformer based in the Halo universe, on a single map with gameplay similar to the Nazi Zombie mod.
After developing the basic player movement, collisions, and physics, I knew I had to start building an area to do my testing. I knew I needed a quick way to make changes to the one map I was making, but it would have been a pain to have to develop a full editor for that purpose. I wouldn’t have had enough time. I tried finding an editor that I would be able to use, just a generic 2d level editor.
GLEED2D came to the rescue. It actually stands for Generic LEvel EDitor 2D. I was able to define objects on a canvas, that had a few default values, like position, scale, rotation. Easily, the most helpful part of this editor, is the ability to create your own custom properties for each object. I was able to give certain objects collision properties, spawn timers, and ammo counts. I even made objects that were used for spatial partitioning, greatly enhancing the speed of my game.
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The only other major obstacle I knew I would face was pathfinding for the enemies. I planned on having different rooms, some of them being very vertical. The enemies had to be able to chase the player wherever they choose to go in order to keep the Nazi Zombie-like gameplay.
I ended up placing about 100 path nodes throughout my level, each one with unique connections to other nodes. Whenever an enemy does not have a path, he goes to the nearest node, finds the path to the player, and along the path, he is given instructions to perform certain actions like jumping or landing. With the custom properties that I could write in GLEED2D, I was able to create reliable pathing for an entire level after the engine for parsing it was done (that was the hard part).
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Click here for a larger screenshot.
I haven’t been able to work on this at all since SGD, so this is the copy of the game I recieved my grade on. It should be very stable, and I’m sure you will enjoy it.
Note: Alt-Enter will switch between windowed and fullscreen.













