Guns with a Z | 2013 - 2014

  • Action Game
  • Fight your way through a procedurally generated city with a wide array of guns at your disposal
  • Use main and sub weapons for both damage and support against an ever increasing horde of enemies
  • Team Responsibilities: Producer, Prototypes and core design iteration, polish elements, gun logic, deprecated enemy logic
  • Team size four, Senior year
Guns with a Z is a top down shooter that takes place in a procedurally generated city.  That means every time you start the game, you'll watch the game build the environment you have to run through.  You land in a random spot and have to fight your way through swaths of enemies to a randomly chosen goal point at the edge of the city.  Guns with a Z seeks to parody more artistic, poetic games by coming off as pretentious as possible at first, then devolving into a simple, fun game with little to no meaning behind it at all.

Guns with a Z was developed using the Unity engine in C# by our team Pistolero Games.

Responsibilities:

-Ran bi-weekly sprints and daily SCRUM meetings
-Project tracking and documentation
-Team on Ones and One on Ones
-Enemy logic, gun logic
-Polish elements such as the HUD, player effects, and environment effects
-Game presentations and milestone scheduling

What went right:

  • The menus were AWESOME.  We consistently elicited laughs from our playtesters, especially upon beating the game.
  • Our programmers created a fantastic infrastructure on which to base events and game logic code that made implementation and iteration really easy.
  • Guns with a Z is one of my best documented and tracked projects as a producer.

What went wrong:

  • The core thing that kills Guns with a Z is how much time we poured into procedural generation.  It took us a small eternity to get working.  In the verbose post mortem, below, I explain into why we didn't cut it (while, objectively, we should have) but in any case it took away so much time we could have used to iterate and polish.
  • The game lacks re-playability.  Many of the post processing effects and polish elements we use in the game are interesting for first time players, but the novelty quickly wears off and it becomes just a standard top down shooter.
  • We wanted it to be a really obvious parody of poetic experiences, but the joke ultimately fell a little flat as we failed to execute completely on it.  Unfortunately the game doesn't really explain to the player by itself it's a parody, rather it usually needs an explanation.
  • At the end of the day... it's just not a very good Top Down Shooter.  I hate to admit it, but it isn't.

What I learned:

  • While unified at the start, near the middle of the project the goals of the members on the team had pretty widely diverged and it badly hurt the project.  Having a unified vision is really, really important - especially when you have a small team.
  • When you aim to make a parody, you have to go all in.  People often miss subtleties: everything you do needs to scream your intentions.

Screenshots:
You can download the GWAZ installer here if you really feel like it.  It should take about 10 minutes to play.
gwaz_installable_executable.exe
File Size: 60241 kb
File Type: exe
Download File