PolyDeadz

Team: Gary Ellis (Designer), Kevin Vargas (Engineer), William Guilford (Designer)

Made in Unreal Engine 4

Blueprints/C++

Genre: Third Person Shooter

Platform: PC

As one of my first projects, this was meant to be a challenging task and force me to learn as much as I can. Using Tom Looman's open source third person shooter template as a base, my team and I made changes that incorporated the successful multiplayer aspects from Looman's project and added our own designs. From artificial intelligence and sever replication to design documentation, this project has helped to teach me many new skills and I am excited to take those skills even further in my next projects.

AI Director System

The most ambitious piece of the PolyDeadz project is an artificial intelligence system that controls both enemy and item spawn rates. The director system takes huge inspiration from the Left 4 Dead series and attempts to modulate the player experience so that each game session is responsive and unique to each team. Information regarding the location of all players and their status is passed to the AI system where it tailors the gameplay experience to the current situation by influencing enemy types, spawn rates as well as item types and spawn rates.

While players participate in the experience, the director carefully monitors their location, health, and number of surrounding enemies to calculate a stress value. The director uses the stress value to determine which items should be spawned, what types of enemies should be spawned, and which player should be attacked the most. I fully intend to develop this artificial intelligence system further and incorporate it into other projects where possible. I thoroughly enjoyed working on this aspect of the game as it simultaneously challenged and excite me.

Previous Iterations

Initially designed as a mobile game, PolyDeadz went through multiple iterations and eventually finalized as being a PC title. Pictured here are short videos of what the early stages of the project looked like.