Zombie Parking

Zombie Parking is a third-person shooter with survival-horror elements. The goal is to hold out in a parking garage for as long as possible against waves of the living dead, who get stronger, faster and more dangerous with every zombie you kill.

It was a learning project that I built with a friend, both of us working on gameplay. It shipped on Steam on 14 April 2016 for Windows, macOS and Linux.

What I worked on

• Combat in Blueprints: a shotgun and a rifle, headshots, and gasoline jerry cans that can be blown up in a fight.
• Enemy scaling: every kill makes the next zombies tougher, so each run gets harder the longer you survive.
• Pickups dropped by zombies: ammo, first aid kits, body armour and timed power-ups (double damage, unlimited ammo, an impenetrable shield, and a "zombie destroyer" that clears the map).
• Progression through Steam achievements: each unlocked achievement grants a permanent upgrade, such as faster shotgun fire, a bigger rifle magazine or a larger explosion radius.
• Steam integration in C++: achievements, stats and leaderboards through Steamworks.
• Partial gamepad support for Xbox controllers.

Challenges

Everything in the project was new to us, from Unreal Engine itself to shipping a commercial game. The hardest step was getting through Steam Greenlight, the community vote Steam used at the time to decide which indie games it would accept onto the store.