Shutdown videogame
Shutdown is a cyberpunk-themed Twin-Stick Shooter.
Switch between a technologically enhanced assassin and her unstoppable mech companion to fulfill a contract. Take a personal revenge on one of the most powerful men in Penteract City, the CEO of Milibot factory.
Video Game Gameplay Programming Lead Audio Sound Design
Penteract Studios is an indie game studio created for the Advanced Programming and Animation and Digital Arts for AAA Video Games master’s degree at UPC Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, with a team of 22 people, 5 artists, and 17 programmers. Together with Teserract Engine, Shutdown is the second project of the Master. It consists of a video game created using our engine.
Shutdown is a cyberpunk-themed Twin-Stick Shooter.
Game pillars
- Character Switching
- Character skills
- Enemy Hordes
Story
Organic life, as we know it, disappeared from the world centuries ago after The Singularity, when machines took over civilization. All that’s left are sentient robots with hyper-advanced AIs and their biggest monument to synthetic existence: Penteract City. The city is a massive agglomeration of concrete and metal, inhabited by androids and controlled by corporations that manipulate the inner workings of society to benefit the few at the expense of the many. In this futuristic dystopia, political governments have ceased to exist. Five mega-corporations (known as The Five) control every social and economic aspect of society. They are currently competing to be the first to develop the Tesseract technology, an unlimited source of energy that will render batteries and electric plants obsolete. But as industrial espionage and direct conflicts are escalating quickly, mercenaries are being hired and assassinations are common.
Fang, an experienced mercenary assassin, and 0-Nimaru, her brawling companion, have earned their reputation in Penteract City. They have been hired by Rosamonde, the director of Synthetica, to eliminate Duke, the CEO of Milibot. Using their enhanced abilities and extensive combat experience, they must shoot, slash and dash their way through countless hordes of Milibot henchmen to reach their target and take his head.
Gameplay
In the following video, you can see the complete gameplay of ShutDown:
I took different roles in the development of Shutdown:
Audio Lead
I’ve been in charge of sound design, the management of the audio team, and creating SFX:
- Sound Design: Creating an audio proposal for the composers, designing all the audio assets of the game and working on balancing and controlling how the sound is positioned inside each level and modifying the different parameters to achieve a good harmony that fits all the sounds together.
- Managing the team: A team of four people, one music composer and three sound effects composers. We created a total of 7 music tracks and 77 sound effect assets.
- Creating SFX: I’ve been part of the composers’ team, focused on the part of the sound effects, helping them to create assets for the project.
Audio Programmer
I’ve been in charge of the audio integration from our Audio Team, creating scripts that manage the sounds for the different objects in the scene like:
- Modifying all the scripts to integrate the audio logic into the object that emits sound. For instance, the sound for the abilities of all the players, enemies, and boss. It includes also all the objects from the scene like lasers, doors, fire, among others.
- Audio Controller: Manage all the music the game has, changing them between different situations like different levels, the pause menu, and the game over, keeping the values between scenes.
- Audio Manager for different channels. It includes the segregation between what is labeled as music and what is labeled as SFX.
- Add footstep functionality, using the keyframe event system from the Animation module, to reproduce each footstep when the animation is reaching the action.
- Outside the Audio department, helping to solve different problems inside the Gameplay scripting module.
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