If you would like to try it for yourself, Showdown At High Moon can be played on itch.io here.
Developed in 10 days for the 2024 GameDev.TV Jam, Showdown At High Moon was my first attempt at recreating FPS mechanics in the Unity Engine.
Game Jams are short, game making marathons where, either as a team of people or as a solo developer, you must create a game from scratch in a set amount of time. This particular jam lasted 10 days and had the additional requirement that only free to use assets were permitted, meaning most toolkits and larger libraries were off the table for this project. I chose to participate as a solo developer for this jam since I knew I wanted to challenge myself to build mechanics that I hadn’t before in Unity and would likely need a fair amount of time to figure it out.
Taking inspiration from horde shooters like Call of Duty Zombies, the player must fend off waves of ghosts as long as they can, with each wave getting more and more difficult. There are four variations of enemies that have varying drop rates of useful power ups like infinite ammo, infinite sprint, or health packs.
I also took some inspiration from Payday 2 in how I implemented the music. Although rather basic, the music starts with an anticipation track while the next wave is loading, also giving the player a short breather. Then, the wave starts with music that informs the player they are not safe and it’s time to blast some ghosts! All the music in the game was created by the legendary ParagonX9 on Newgrounds.
There is a lot of room for improvement with this project, but I’m incredibly proud of what I built within those 10 days. Currently, it is rather difficult and the world you run around is completely empty. Were I to make it again, I would spend a bit more time building out an environment and likely would have tried to add some more variations of ghosts so that I could make the waves ramp up in difficulty a bit smoother. For my first attempt at this style of game though, especially with the time constraint, I’m incredibly happy with how it turned out.