GUNMETAL
ROLE
Indie
DESCRIPTION
Gunmetal is a multiplayer FPS aimed at recreating the high intensity environment of close quarters/skirmish type shooters. Players can host matches on a number of different maps and customize weapon loadouts. Gameplay is smooth and designed in such a way to allow players freedom to play conservatively or hit trickshots if they want.
BACKSTORY
Gunmetal was one of my first big projects and an introduction into multiplayer networking for me. I started development on this project just to see how much I could learn about using Unity to make a multiplayer first person shooter. Over the years I added weapons, animations, environments, UI assets, and sounds. The game went through various visual and mechanical phases, all of which I posted to my Youtube channel along the way which garnered most of my viewership and subscriptions as people wanted to see progress. I even received a few calls from interested parties who wanted to publish it once it was finished. Sadly, I never really planned on finishing this game as it was just a fun project to keep posting updates for and working on in my free time. That's where the project is now, although I hope to keep working on it as a way to keep growing my skills.
TECHNICAL HISTORY (FOR NERDS)
Gunmetal was built off of a basic multiplayer first person shooter template that used Photon Unity Networking (PUN) as the networking solution. I spent a lot of time modifying and adding onto the base kit to meet my specific needs. Much of this time was spent replacing art assets such as weapon view models, player models, environments, and parts of the UI like fonts and other graphics. I also brought in many custom animation and sound packs to increase the graphical and audible fidelity of the project slightly. There were a couple improvements I made that were technically challenging such as adding visible legs to the first person view and a toggleable third person view. To fake a full-body effect for the first person view I cut the character mesh in half but kept the rig so the humanoid animations would still work. Then I added these legs as a child of the main body so it would move with it accordingly. I also hooked it up to the same animations and then offset it slightly so it looked right in the first person view. The third person view just involved lerping the main camera to the position of the third person camera and then switching which one was active as well as showing the third person player model and hiding the arms and gun. I continued to make more improvements after this but the work has begun to slow down.
