Shattered Operations (or “Ops” for short) was one of the first fully-fledged games I had developed in Unity. I started programming the core of the game during mid-2014 using JavaScript, but a little while later transitioned to using C# because of its larger popularity in Unity. I also started the project using Unity 4 and NGUI (the UI plugin for Unity before they had a comprehensive system), but later upgraded the project to Unity 5, remastered it with PBR graphics, and updated the UI to the new system built-in to Unity.
Shattered Ops, in its essence, was a survival wave-based first-person shooter (heavily inspired by Call of Duty’s zombie mode, and the Mist by Stephen King). The player is placed in the shoes of a soldier surviving in a post-apocalyptic city named Gleechester while he fights off ever-increasingly harder waves of gigantic bug-looking creatures. The mechanics are simple: survive as many waves as you can, as you upgrade your weapons, purchase upgrades, and unlock new areas in the map, as waves start getting progressively harder.
At first, the game is simple: you start with a pistol and a few bullets. You can purchase more ammo or open new areas to explore. You’re tasked to save points and budget them carefully on new upgrades. Once a few areas are unlocked, you’ll be presented with the airdrop menu upgrade:
This menu lets the user upgrade their player permanently (similar to how perk-a-cola drinks work in Call of Duty). However, instead, they are given a flare gun which they can use to signal the location of their air drop. However, if they miss their shot the upgrade could be lost. Other upgrades, such as auto-turret, many different kinds of weapons, and even your own gun-smithing machine that can upgrade your bullets to laser were available if you survived long enough to collect the points. By wave 10, the game became exceedingly hard to continue.
After drafting a backstory and context, I decided to also script a first mission that would serve as an intro to a campaign. This mission was short but demonstrated the basic mechanics of what could expand into a mission-based game with an arcade wave-based mode. Ultimately, as a personal project, it never expanded beyond a couple of wave-based maps, plus the first campaign mission.
Oh, but the coolest part was firing the mini-gun on the helicopter. Check out the game here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZaOS2pPOOo