Shooter – Case Study

It had been a long-standing wish of mine to build a simple first-person shooter in the Unity Game Engine. Within about twenty hours I created a training course that tests players' speed, accuracy, and movement.

Worth mentioning is that I hadn't expected just how much logic and state management goes into a character controller for a first-person shooter. A first-person shooter lives and dies by the feedback players receive (sound, animations, VFX). Implementing all these components in a sensible, design-friendly way within Unity's entity-component system turned out to be a welcome challenge.

For this project I also looked into the concepts of light maps and light baking. I built a level with both indoor and outdoor sections, as well as covered and partially hidden areas. It's remarkable how much performance can be saved here. Going forward, I'll definitely make sure to use as few dynamic lights as possible in my levels.