Redhead Redemption

Redhead Redemption is our CSCI-22 final project, a top-down LAN multiplayer shooter. The main inspiration was Left 4 Dead 2, a game I used to play a lot with my friends during the pandemic. I really wanted to recreate that "survive and escape with your friends" feeling. I also took a lot of inspiration from RyiSnow, a YouTuber who makes great Java game dev tutorials.

You spawn on an island with zombies everywhere. The goal is to survive and escape. You find keys to unlock the next area while switching between weapons (SMG, shotgun, rifle) and using medkits and traps along the way. You eventually reach a helicopter for your first escape. The second part of the game is a bridge. You fight off more zombies and gather fuel for the helicopter, but you never have quite enough, so you have to go back and find more before you can finally reach the helipad and escape. The zombies also had different abilities, some venomous, some melee only, and the characters had melee attacks too.

The trickiest part was making the networking actually work. I spent two to three days debugging an issue where the client was sending coordinates to the server just fine, but the server wasn't sending them back correctly, so positions on each client weren't matching up. Turned out it was a simple indexing issue in a for loop. Two to three days of debugging for one line. That hurt.

The funniest memory from this project is that me and my pair spent months building the game and only actually played it together the day before the deadline. We both just looked at each other like, wait, this is actually really fun. I think that says everything. If you have the chance, try it out. It's genuinely a good time.