Mason Crochetiere
Technical Designer
Project HERO
This page goes over the in-depth summer 2023 development of Project: HERO. The project has expanded in more ways than I can count - to the point that a summary of it all would need its own website! So, instead, I've kept this page the same as a relic of my accomplishments at the time. You will see the fruits of the new Project: HERO vision everywhere else on the site, like at the new Hero Design Dives.
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Read on to hear more about what I made just during my freshman summer.
Project HERO was my big project for the summer of ‘23. At the start of the summer, I knew that I wanted to engage in some form of team project. When I realized that team setting could be best utilized riffing on one of my favorite game genres - the hero shooter - everything clicked into place. A caveman started balling. Project HERO is a singleplayer hero shooter with a focus on bursts of fast, intense gameplay with imaginative and amusing characters.
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I served as the core engine behind the project: I gathered a team together by creating a network for all of my peers, made decisions that ultimately allows the project to thrive and succeed in the time period that we had to make it, created much of the hero and enemy design, and programmed the vast majority of the game’s features.
From a game design perspective, I really got to embrace everything I had learned from my first year at Champlain in designing interactive gameplay. The kits of each hero are intricate and create room for a variety of playstyles, something I had been learning through playing Overwatch as a competitive esport & understanding the abilities those heroes used.
Caveman Balling, the first hero we created for the game, has a playstyle centered around control over his Basketball Rock while also utilizing his variety of survival skills. There’s room to play offensively and defensively here, and there are a lot of fancy techniques you can do with the basketball.
What made working on Project HERO interesting compared to what I understood about traditional hero shooters was that it is a singleplayer game. It’s you against AI bots with no teammates, and that does a lot to shape the gameplay: The heroes need to be more well-rounded while still having weaknesses and playstyles that make them fun. Additionally, the enemy characters needed to be dynamic in ways that make challenging them interesting and engaging.
Something that I really appreciated was the opportunities I had to test the game at Champlain’s Summer Game Academy. This made the values of testing very clear (you learn a lot about your game from someone who isn't making it) and provided lots of useful feedback that I could integrate into the game.
At the start of the project, I made the decision to use Unity’s FPS Microgame template as the base of the game. This sped up initial development considerably - we didn’t need to program many basic mechanics that would have been necessary to get the game off the ground. Instead, time went in to refining the hero system and mechanics surrounding it. That said, the template left much to be desired in terms of enemy AI. I had to design and program many systems to improve the enemies, such as a system that made enemies take and utilize effective cover positions - they were much smarter, essentially, than the built-in system.
I had to put a lot of work in to lead the team properly. After rounding everyone together, I was a constant source of the game’s vision and direction, which needed to be communicated frequently to the team of 2 artists, 2 designers, and 2 programmers I had assembled together. That communication and interactive work led to the creation of some really fantastic systems, assets, and levels that make the game and its heroes feel really distinct. The upgrade from a single gun prototype to an actual octopus actually holding 8 guns was absolutely wild, and I couldn’t have been happier.
