RUSHMORE

Rushmore is a third-person hack-n-slash / shooter hybrid that places the player into the shoes of the four legendary Presidents of Mount Rushmore as they slice and blast their way through aliens in the far future.

Update

Updated for full steam release 6/2023

FORMAT

Engine

Unreal Engine 4

Team Size

Fifteen

Development Time

Ten weeks during a school semester with a few weeks of prototype development by a team of two prior to the full team's formation and several weeks of solo polish in the subsequent years.

ROLES & TASKS

Creative Director

Conveying Core Vision
Coordinating Team Tasks
Prioritizing Post-Project Fixes

Lead Designer

Game Design Documentation
HUD & Menu Design
Core Systems & Mechanics Design
AI Design
Tutorial Design
Supervising All Design
Establishing The Level Design Pipeline
Blocking Out & Set-Dressing Levels

Programmer

UI & Menu Functionality
AI Functionality
Steam Achievement Implementation
Misc. Bug Fixes

DESIGN GOALS

Create a short (roughly 10-20 minute) game that manifests the themes of "Anachronism", "Diminishing Returns", and "Adaptation" with its gameplay and narrative
Create a truly mechanically deep gameplay experience which lends a relatively short core experience potentially countless more hours of gameplay opportunity

TECHNICAL GOALS

Create a responsive and in depth but digestible HUD
Create a menu system that’s navigable seamlessly on Gamepad and Keyboard & Mouse
Manifest our AI Designs properly using UE4’s behavior trees and environmental query system

DESIGN DISCUSSION

Having received the initial concept of "Mount Rushmore Presidents fighting aliens with swords and guns in the future" from the small team that generated the game's prototype, my initial goal was to extend the idea into a fully defined gameplay experience while imbuing it with additional depth inspired by the various themes on the table.

"Anachronism" was the only theme already integrated narratively and mechanically from the start so the first step was tackling how the other themes could inform the gameplay and narrative.

Mechanically "Diminishing Returns" was applied to the Ranged / Melee combat in the form of either mode eventually leading to a dead end if pursued for too long. Ranged combat, while generally safe and higher damage, offers no opportunity to replenish health as health pickups drop at the feet of enemies and fade fairly quickly; Melee combat might keep the player close to health pickups but is still unsustainable for longer periods as the lack of damage output and increased risk of taking damage compound. The goal of this system was to push the player toward a flow of engaging in combat from a distance, diving into the fray (while using abilities to provide cover and enhance strength), collecting as much health as possible, then retreating back out toward the outskirts.

"Adaptation" was worked into the gameplay both through the Presidents and the weapons. It was decided the Presidents would function not merely as vehicles for abilities but as cohesive classes that serve their own mechanical themes and goals. It was also established that the player could swap between them at will. The catch would be that, should a President die, the player would be forced to swap to another and the President that died would remain dead until the end of the level. This system forces players to think on their feet with their strategies and penalizes them with the challenge of necessitated adaptation should they not balance their strategies well. With weapons a similar idea is presented. There are 12 total weapons in the game from 4 distinct classes, each with their own unique weapon ability. These weapons are located around the world in hidden drop locations and can only be bought from the in game store once they've been picked up at least once. This gently encourages the player to constantly be exploring and trying out new weapons to ensure their arsenal is well stocked and optimal for their desired playstyle.

Narratively "Diminishing Returns" fits in through the all purpose "goo" derived from the aliens which creates a hierarchy of effects from giving the Presidents super powers (high impact) to improving weaponry (moderate impact) to simply restoring health (low impact).

Within the narrative "Adaptation" is core to the human strategy for survival. Humanity drags Presidents to the future to aid them in their fight and then leverages the aliens' own biology against them.

Themes aside, there were several other challenges that came in the design of the game.

With such a high volume of content, creating distinct design identities for four Presidents (each with their two abilities, melee weapon, and passive) and twelve weapons each with a special abilities took a great deal of thought and exploration. Some things came easy since we knew we wanted to pull inspiration from the historical exploits of these famous figures, but how wanted to manifest that took time. We evolved from a more paired down hero and ability structure to a more MOBA-like setup with mechanics that allow for massively increased performance once mastered. The twelve weapons underwent a similar design process with names, abilities, and stat profiles being designed in tandem to create as many distinct weapons that we hadn’t seen before as possible.

Tutorializing a game with so many different mechanics and elements was a bit daunting at first. Ultimately I opted for a short and optional mechanics-focused tutorial that reviews the core elements of the game and allows for additional experimentation should the player desire it. This was meant to mitigate players being swamped with large lists of mechanics and abilities. The game's first real level gently introduces each enemy type one at a time to get the player up to speed on engagement with opposition in a realistic setting. While in game, an easily accessible "additional HUD display" button can provide a quick reminder of what the player's current loadout offers and what the status of all key elements are without overloading the HUD with all of that information at all times. Finally, within the game's menus is a "Game Info" screen which can be referenced at any time to review President abilities, weapon stats / abilities, enemies, and world content.

STORIES

Being brought onto the project as Creative Director for a team of fifteen when the team was previously comprised of only three required top to bottom restructuring of what the game was how it’d suit all the needs of the people working on it. Ultimately I think everyone walked away with the opportunity for a portfolio piece that they were looking for.
When I went to tackle menus in the project I saw the limitations of how Unreal handles gamepad widget navigation. Ultimately I decided to create my own system to make the transition between keyboard & mouse input and gamepad input seamless and that system of libraries and widgets evolved into the menu pack that I’m still developing at the time of writing.
Our project’s sole level designer had very limited level design experience and, although I had limited experience as well, as Lead Designer I felt it was my duty to guide the development process so I took it upon myself to research the level design pipeline and create an official pipeline that we’d follow all throughout development to create our levels. I also ended up getting in engine and building or set-dressing significant portions of our levels.
Our AI programmer was new to AI development and wanted to tackle AI as a challenge so one of the other designers and I created an ambitious AI design to create dynamic engagements. Ultimately, halfway through the projects development it became clear that our ambitious design was a bit too ambitious to be realistic so I took it upon myself to rescope the AI design and give our AI programmer a much more realistic goal to hit. Ultimately much of the design was manifested for our “alpha” release and the parts that weren’t able to be implemented I eventually returned to myself to research and implement.
Since I was alone for the process of finishing the process (adding fixing bugs and adding polish) I had to really prioritize what fixes were worth making and which weren’t. I also had to get creative with how I was making those fixes as I had no real means of generating whole new art assets. To do this I kitbashed assets and VFX and made some unique implementations of common features (to create melee hit stop I briefly scale enemies) to achieve my goals.

Rushmore