Survival Shooter – Nightmares

2014 – Game, Tutorial

Nightmares is a tutorial project by James Bouckley and myself, originally created for the Unite 2014 Training Day, which then expanded into a full tutorial series. It was put together in a few weeks, with all art done by myself (concepts, models, textures, lighting, custom shaders, character rigs, UI) except for the character animations, which were handled by Damien Simper.

The project ended up being a phenomenal success – it’s currently been downloaded around 20,000 times a month a whole year after release, formed the basis for multiple successful indie and commercial projects, and has been used as a demo testbed for various VR vendors, Razer, Leap, Microsoft, Playstation and many more.

The initial concepts only took a day or so to put together and set the tone for the whole project. We wanted to create an isometric twin-stick shooter in the vein of popular games like Minigore, Zombox, World Zombination, etc. but with a twist on the usual zombie stylings. We came up with the idea of setting it in a child’s nightmare, with the player shrunk down and being attacked by possessed, undead toys, and building the scene to feel like a post-apocalyptic ruin, made up of everyday things you’d find in a children’s room, with a few cheeky nods to horror films and dream imagery.

Here are some images and links to just a very few of the cool things other people have done with the art assets –

https://share.oculus.com/app/nighttime-terror
http://twiik.net/unity/survival-shooter-extended
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tinyquests.survival
http://www.lennyjm.com/survival-shooter-demo