Texas Throw ‘Em is an 3D action game where the player plays as Ace, a wild west, card slinging criminal on the run from the law. Ace has just broken out of jail and is looking towards a shiney new casino in the town of Gunflats. Play as Ace and grab the money and go before being riddled with bullets in this cartoony card throwing shooter! Texas Throw ‘Em is currently my primary focus as my graduate capstone, along with three others using Unreal Engine 5.

Texas Throw ‘em almost ended up being named Hoodwink. I joined the team 5 months into the production when the development went through a major pivot in art style from realistic to low poly and one of the core mechanic was scrapped out of the design.

With me joining the team of 4 as a level and systems designer I suggested the name Texas Throw ‘em as a twist on the actual card game Texas Hold ‘em due to the core mechanic of the game being card throws.

I quickly familiarized myself with the existing codebase and jumped into level design. I designed three different quests for the player to do first and then based on the pace and flow I wanted the quests to be I designed the levels/buildings those quests would take place in. You can see the progression of the bank building from gray box to a finished level at the end of this page.
To design these buildings I researched the buildings during the 1890s time period as that was the time the game story took placed in. And after creating the Gray boxes I designed and implemented the underlying systems that were needed for the levels to functions such as locked doors and alarms, progression, objectives and quest beacons.

The casino level went through quite a bit of change from the initial design as the team faced some challenges with the enemy AI implementation. I adapted the design to be able to work with the AI that our team had developed which compromised a little in terms of architecture of the building. However it made for a fun gameplay experience.

The team also hired a sound composer to compose a song for us for the teaser that you can watch on the right side of this text. I used the unreal engine’s cinematography tools to record the clips for video teaser.

Overall I loved working on this project and learned a lot of things as we developed it.