Night Heist
3D Networked Multiplayer Stealth Action
“Night Heist” is a 3D networked game that pits two teams of players against each other in a futuristic museum environment. One team plays thieves that are played in 3rd person for greater awareness when sneaking around. Thieves cannot fight and must rely on stealth and distractions to complete their objective. The other team is guards. Guards are played in first person to reduce their field of vision and to ensure that the thieves know where they are looking. Guards rely on traps, gadgets, and their weapons to complete their objective. The objective of the thieves is to steal one of three artifacts. The guards must stop them.
“Night Heist” is networked and each player plays on their own machine. The environment plays a large part in how the game plays. Rooms have different types of draw backs or benefits for each team. Rooms can be well lit, dark, loud, silent, cluttered, open, vertical, or flat.
The Work
As a Level Designer on this project I had created and blocked out three levels for various modes. This included creating some rudimentary props in Maya to fill the space with to get the right mood and lines of sight. I had done many iterations on these levels as per playtest data, art requirements, and submission requirements. Research was done on various museums to try to understand their structure, layout style, and general shape to hopefully land the mood of a museum.
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As a Technical Designer I designed and implemented quite a few of the character's abilities. I scripted the thief's cloaking ability including the material, the power generator panels in the rooms that recharge their abilities and kill the lights, the flash-bang ability, the guards shooting, trap and motion sensor placing, the capture and re-spawn mechanics as well as the artifact stealing and victory conditions and many others. During the third semester to help streamline the game many of these systems or abilities were cut, but I feel like doing them still taught me a lot.
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Through the course of this project I learned how to use blueprints for both single player and networked multiplayer purposes. Learning what types of information needs to be passed to the server as well as which of that information needs to be passed to all players was crucial for a networked multiplayer game.