HORDE

"Horde" was a 3 month solo project developed as part of the CSE 450 - Video Game Programming course at Washington University in St. Louis. The project was developed wholely from scratch with all features and art being developed independently over the course of the semester. Horde was the first project which I developed and implimented features. The project prioritized completion and polish over the quantity of features, as such the gameplay features are simplistic. The project was developed in Unity and the scripting language in C#. All models, textures, animations, and UI elements were made using Blender.

ASSET CREATION PROCESS

The player model was made from scratch and based off of various armor sets from the Dark Souls series and Elden Ring. The design is simplistic and is looks akin to standard armor designs of the late medieval period. All materials were created using Blender's procedural shader nodes. All rigging and animations were done in Blender and rendered to a sprite sheet to be used as a 2D asset in Unity.

The basic design for the enemies were influenced by the thralls from Dark Souls III and the imps in Elden Ring. The basic body structure and movements additionally were derived from the respective references. The model shown is a base model from which enemy types derive from. All enemy types use the same base model but vary in accessories, animations, and skin texture. Similar to the player model, all materials were created using Blender's procedural shader nodes. All rigging and animations were done in Blender and rendered to a sprite sheet as well.

LEVEL CREATION

Given the nature of the gameplay, the background was decided at an early stage to be static, as such, it would be possible to render a 3D scene in a software and use the rendered image as a backdrop to create a pseudo 3D game. The composition of the background took direct influence from the Bridge of Eldin map from Super Smash Bros. The lighting of the scene and the details of the background (namely the castle to the left) took influence from concept art of Lothric from Dark Souls III. The final backdrop was rendered as two separate elements, with the bridge being the foreground and the remaining being the background. Separating the two parts allowed for animated assets to be placed between the foreground and background on a static set.