The Outbreak

A top-down 2D game played over a local network. One machine hosts, everyone else finds the game on the LAN and clicks it. No matchmaking service, no accounts, no internet.

The lobby holds until three players are in, and then, in its own words, roles are dealt in secret and nobody can tell you apart. Survivors and infected look identical. That is the game: not a shooter with a co-op mode bolted on, but a social-deduction round where the map is the pressure and the other players are the problem.

The Outbreak is a student game project in development, with the focus on reaching a playable final build.

The decision the whole project turns on

The scene is generated by code rather than authored by hand. An editor hook runs on load and, if the open scene has no bunker in it, builds the entire thing: map sprite, wall grid, player prefab, network manager, UI and camera. Opening the project and pressing Play works with nothing to save first.

That sounds like a detail and is not. A Unity scene file is a large piece of serialised state, and it is the single worst thing to merge. Two people moving objects in the same scene produces a conflict no diff tool can resolve sensibly. Making the scene a build artifact rather than a committed file removes that whole class of problem. The cost is that editing the scene by hand becomes the wrong move: to change the camera zoom or character scale you change a constant in the setup script and re-run it.

The tooling that comes with that decision lives under a Tools ▸ Bunker menu: build the LAN scene, re-bake the wall colliders after painting the grid, reset the walls to the generated floor plan, rebuild the player prefab from the spritesheet, and turn the on-load build off when you want it off.

Worth noting

The repository carries an architecture document and a code guide written for someone else to pick it up. Most student game projects do not, and it is the part of this repo I would point an interviewer at first.

The preview above shows the bunker lobby before a round begins. One player is standing by while the interface waits for three players and explains that roles will be assigned in secret.