Arrow Heads

Arrow Heads is a, couch and online multiplayer, arena game. Armed with your trusty bow, shoot rockets, avoid laser beams, and lodge arrows into the heads of your closest friends. Or if you’d like to keep your friendships intact, there’s a fully co-operative survival mode as well!

Arrow Heads was created initially for the Level Up! Student Showcase in 2016, an provincial game development showcase and competition for Universities and Colleges. After winning multiple awards there, including Best Overall Game, the game went on to win top prize at the national level in with the ESAC's student competition as well.

After the reception at competitions, our small 6 person team went on to develop Arrow Heads for a full Steam release, adding large features like a co-op survival mode, and online multiplayer. This served as the debut title for my first founded game studio, OddBird Studio.

Duties

  • Designed most of the core gameplay and gameplay loop

  • Engineered gameplay and mechanics for functionality over online play

  • Developed AI from the ground up for our survival mode

  • Created all visual effects and many custom shaders

Learnings

  • Learned how to design for social play, and many techniques to provide for fun multiplayer experiences

  • Developed technical knowledge and skill in creating online multiplayer experiences

  • Learned valuable techniques for taking internal and external feedback; and turning it into actional production tasks

A Look Back...

I sit down with some of the other developers of Arrow Heads (our first released game), and reflect on the things we learned.