Killdown

Killdown was made for the Game Makers Toolkit Game Jam. The theme was "Cooldown," and this time I challenged myself to join a group to improve my teamwork and communication skills.

Killdown is a first-person slasher where you fight through waves of enemies with a sword that has a timer. When the timer reaches zero, the sword closes, leaving you vulnerable to enemies and forcing you to flee until its cooldown timer expires. During that time, you can visit terminals scattered around the city to buy upgrades for your sword using the souls of defeated enemies. This creates a fun gameplay loop where players look forward to mowing down enemies while their sword is active, collecting souls over time, and then avoiding enemies by using the city's layout when the sword is unavailable and buying upgrades with the collected souls.

I worked as the level designer on the team since I had more experience designing 3D levels from working on Time Crunch. At first, I thought we were going to create a series of small, linear dungeon levels with a mix of light platforming and combat in large arenas, similar to DOOM. However, it was decided that the game would instead feature a single large arena where enemies spawn endlessly and become stronger the longer the player survives. This presented an interesting challenge because I had to ensure the arena wasn't too large, remained fun to navigate, and prevented players from being easily cornered by enemies. I came up with the idea of setting the arena in a town square with a fountain in the centre, two bridges to add verticality, and four surrounding sections connected by alleyways that players could use to evade enemies more effectively. I initially had some difficulty designing the alleyways, but I looked at games that use maze-like layouts, such as Pac-Man, for inspiration. I was really happy with how the level turned out and found it very fun to traverse during playtesting.

I also worked as one of the group's game designers, helping to expand the game's initial concept. My primary responsibility was designing the upgrades that players could purchase at the upgrade terminals. Since players face an endless horde of monsters that grow stronger over time, it made sense to begin with basic upgrades that improve their chances of survival, such as increased health, movement speed, and attack power. After that, another designer and I created more unique upgrades that changed how players approached combat, such as draining health with every sword hit or gaining more souls at the cost of taking increased damage. In total, we created around 15 upgrades, giving players the opportunity to create powerful builds and making each run feel different from the last.

In the end, we were super happy with how the game came out especially since we had four days to make.