You find yourself trapped in the old metro tunnels of Soviet Kouvola… and as if your situation doesn’t seem bad enough already, you quickly find out that you’re not alone. The infected citizens of Kouvola are coming for you, and you need to escape while you still can! So load up your Shotbat™ and smash your way into freedom! Or you might never see daylight ever again…
The idea
Everything started with our idea for a cool weapon design that would be a combination of a baseball bat and a shotgun, so you could use it for both hitting and shooting the enemies. We wanted to make a dark game with a realistic style, and were inspired by games like Metro, Fallout and Wolfenstein. We wanted the environment to be like metro tunnels and dark underground environments like sewers and maintenance rooms, and were also heavily inspired by old Soviet architecture and themes. We wanted the player character to be a strong female character with some attitude, and for the enemies we wanted to make something resembling zombies, with the idea being that they were maybe infected by something. And of course we quickly decided that the game should be taking place in Kouvola.
The process
We started by working on basic building blocks for the environment and the enemy models, as well as experimenting with some blood and gore effects. We also had the camera and basic movement set up very quickly, as well as the night vision and grenade mechanics. The enemy models were created by having three different body types (skinny, muscular and fat), all of which were given shape keys that can be used to add variation to the enemy body types and proportions. Later we started building the level and adding the combat mechanics and hand animations for the player, as well as adding some sound effects and implementing different enemy types. Most of the work was done in bursts, and the whole game was finalized in the last few days before the presentation, by building a bigger level with more content, adding sound effects, tweaking the animations, adding particle effects and just polishing everything. We plan to continue working on this game more in the future, but after the final crunch, the game is already in a decent place.
Download the game from itch.io
Team
From left to right:
Peetu Kuoppala: Programming, VFX, Props
Eemeli Mäntylä: Enemy models, Props
Rama Hannula: Programming, SFX, VFX, Animations
Axel Kulomaa: Environment models, Level design, Props
Onni Lahti: Lead Programmer, UI
Umut Soydan: Illustrations, Weapon model, Props