Born Without Brakes (BWOB)

Role / Responsibilities: Combat Systems and Level Design

Team: Duo Development

Tools: Godot engine, Google Documentation Suite

Development: 12 weeks

Game Overview

Born Without Brakes - BWOB is a fast paced co-op wave shooter where players survive a robot apocalypse.

BWOB keeps players moving and engaged in combat with threatening, agile enemies and map mechanics that push players into different areas of play.

Level Design pipeline

Building threatening AI

One of the main challenges we faced during development was developing a threatening AI. This was an issue we knew about from our own testing but also player feedback and testing observations.

I worked with a programmer to build a solid enemy AI that could always navigate towards the player.

  • I set up Nav-Links all around the level to connect Nav-Mesh chunks to allow the robot enemies to “jump”.

  • This meant enemies could always reach the player as Nav-Links were on all surfaces.

  • I also provided them with many shortcuts around the level so they could pursue the player from multiple directions and apply pressure.

pink Nav-Link rings

Conclusion / Post Mortem

Stress test lobby containing 14 players

This was my first time working in Godot, and on a networked multiplayer game. Both aspects made the project all the more challenging but it was very rewarding to see it come together.

Our intended experience goals for the project were: speed & movement, satisfying gunplay, teamplay and intensity.

Something we noticed early during testing was that players didn’t feel like they were cooperating and instead playing more in parallel (teamplay experience goal).

To address this challenge we added a revive mechanic and the ability to see teammate outlines through walls. This changed help bring back some teamplay to the game experience. This was just one change however and with some more time we discussed having more interactions between players like class and weapon based utility options that players could use to help one another, further strengthening the teamplay aspect.


The movement was polished and fun, playtesters often mentioned how fun it was to parkour and climb around, trying to master movement tech like rocket-jumping or slide-jumping.

We saw this often during testing session where people would lobby together and intentionally spend their time trying to master the movement, typically rocket jumping.

Fast Paced Combat

I tested various movement based abilities during prototyping to ensure what we landed on for the final kit available to the player was satisfying and meaningful.

This includes planning, tweaking and frequently playtesting the slide ability, wall-run, bunny hop and rocket jump.

I designed the level to encourage and sometimes require the use of the games movement mechanics to smoothly traverse.

Level layout paper prototype overlayed onto in-game level

I started designing the level with iterations of a paper prototype, followed by a 3D blockout that was refined and tweaked into the final design and finally the implementation of final art assets.

  • The players movement abilities were key in the designing the level.

  • Certain areas are designed to encourage the use of sliding, wall running and mounting, apparent by the use of indicating graffiti on the walls.

  • I designed the level to contain zero dead ends players could end up in.

This was a problem I wanted to avoid particularly for a fast paced game like this and I made sure players always had alternate routes to escape problematic situations.