The Graveyard Shift

Credits

Time In Development: 28/02/23 - 30/06/23

Person	Role(s)
Declan Lloyd	Lead Programmer, Environment Artist
Dylan Hearsum	Lead Level Designer, UI Artist
Jared Tapping	Lead Artist
Scarlet Rose	Lead Audio Engineer

About The Game

The Graveyard Shift is a vertical slice of a side-scrolling 2D survival game developed in Unreal Engine 4.27. This was the 3rd and final project I worked on at Level 3 Year 1 of my games design course at South Gloucestershire & Stroud College. It is based around the theme of waves, and was designed with the goal of making a vertical slice containing 1 level and a tutorial in only 18 weeks.

You play as a gravedigger in a graveyard where the dead are being reanimated for an unknown reason. You have to travel through the graveyard fighting waves of skeletons and animated suits of armour in order to escape with your life. Each enemy can be dealt with using normal combat, but they also have a unique way of defeating them. For the skeleton, this is digging a hole and hitting them into it. For the animated suit of armour, this is leading it into the pools of water located around the map, turning it into a pile of rusted scrap.

The enemies drop ancient artefacts that serve as temporary power-ups to a number of different stats. At the end of each level, we intended the player to face a boss creature to test the skills you have learned over the course of the level. This did unfortunately end up getting cut though, due to time constraints.

How To Play The Game

You begin by starting in an optional tutorial. This teaches you all of the controls, as well as how every mechanic works. I highly recommend going through this, as a lot of effort was put into making it work!

You have to stave off 3 waves of enemies in order to complete the level. You need to dig holes with the right mouse button and hit skeletons until they fall in. The holes only last for 15 seconds though! The armour can be lead into the water to rust it up. Movement is handled with the A and D keys, and jumping is handled with W or the space bar. You can pause the game with Esc.