Gunman Chronicles is a 2000 first-person shooter built on Valve’s GoldSrc engine. Originally developed as a fan-made project, it grew into a full standalone game that mixes fast-paced sci-fi combat with a distinctly western-inspired setting. It stood out for its varied environments, dinosaurs and alien creatures, drivable vehicles, and especially its configurable weapons, giving the player several ways to approach combat.
Gunman Reimagined is a short-term portfolio project inspired by a game that left a lasting impression on me from a young age. With only one month to complete it, the goal is to create a focused showcase of both my level design and system design skills, while filling a gap in my portfolio. The project deliberately reimagines rather than recreates the original: the core premise remains familiar, but the pacing, encounters, and overall design have been adapted to my own vision and the limited production time.
Project Summary
Duration: 1 month
Focus: Level design, System design
Tools: Unreal, Blender, Photoshop
My approach was to stay close to the original game’s overall flow while revisiting areas where I felt the design could be strengthened. The original moves through its story very quickly, so I slowed the pacing slightly to give key moments more room to breathe.
I also rewrote most of the dialogue, preserving its underlying messages while bringing the writing closer to modern standards.
From a gameplay perspective, I gave the player their weapons from the beginning, introduced combat earlier, and expanded parts of the opening level. This gives the player an immediate reason to engage with the weapons they are given and helps the level maintain a more deliberate pace.
Finally, while keeping the original structure recognizable, I adjusted several sections to improve composition to communicate the player’s objectives more clearly.
System Design
Before I could start building the levels, I first needed to establish the systems that would make the experience possible.
I tuned the player movement toward the faster, more responsive feel of old-school shooters and recreated the original weapon configuration system. While it is not fully polished, most of the underlying functionality is in place, with most of the remaining work being balance and tuning.
I also built the basic health and damage systems, a lightweight AI setup, and an event-driven system for controlling scripted moments such as ambushes, explosions, and gunfire. These systems provided the foundation needed to build and iterate on the level itself.
The health system is built around a reusable Actor Component that can be attached to anything that needs to be killable or destructible. When its health reaches zero, the component broadcasts an event to its owning actor rather than dictating what should happen next.
This keeps the health logic independent from the object using it, allowing an enemy, destructible object, or other actor to respond differently to the same event. When a hit is registered, the weapon first checks for a valid health component before applying damage, preventing damage calls from being made against actors that cannot take damage.
The component also supports events for taking damage and being healed, which are not currently used in the project but leave the system open for additions such as health pickups and other gameplay interactions.
The event handler follows the same principle of keeping responsibilities separated. A trigger volume detects when the player enters an area, then iterates through a predefined array of actors, checking whether they implement the relevant Blueprint Interface.
If valid, it simply sends the appropriate signal, the event handler determines when something should happen, while the receiving actor determines what happens. The event handler also implements the same interface itself, allowing events to be chained together and complex sequences to be built from smaller, independent events.
The implementation is somewhat rough in places due to the project's tight timeline and my use of some unfamiliar technology, but the underlying system is functional and provides a flexible foundation for scripted encounters.
Level Design
One of my main goals was to improve the pacing without losing the flow that made the original level recognizable. The original’s fast movement, combined with the timing of its voice lines, could make dialogue easy to miss unless the player stopped moving, something that conflicts with the game’s emphasis on speed.
I addressed this by having the player walk during the opening, where there is little reason to run yet. This gives the dialogue room to breathe while also creating a natural window to introduce the project title and credits.
I expanded several areas significantly, both to slow down the sequence and to give the additional content room to breathe. Despite these changes, the overall route remains closely aligned with the original, keeping its key turns and direction while giving the player more time and space to experience what happens along the way.
I also wanted to give some of the original game’s underused mechanics a more meaningful role. The flashlight, for example, is rarely necessary in the original, so I introduced a significantly darker section where using it becomes an important part of navigating the environment. This is an area I would have liked to develop further with more time, as there were several opportunities to build on the idea.
More broadly, there are parts of the level I would revisit or refine given additional development time, but with the entire project limited to one month, some ideas had to remain at a smaller scale. One area I am particularly happy with is the transition into combat: encounters are introduced more quickly, while carefully composed sightlines help establish threats and points of interest before the player reaches them.
Staying close to the original layout presented an interesting challenge around backtracking. Reusing previously visited areas can hurt pacing and make progression feel repetitive, but it also has an advantage: the player already understands the space.
Rather than spending attention on navigation, they can focus on the events and combat unfolding around them. My solution was to reuse familiar areas while introducing new routes and changes to the space where possible. In the sections where I did this, the approach worked well, but with more time I would have pushed this concept further. More alternate routes and changes to familiar spaces would have preserved the benefits of familiarity while making the return journey feel less like simply retracing the player's steps.
Another area where I feel I could have pushed the design further is movement itself. Despite putting considerable effort into making the movement feel right, I only really challenge it in a couple of places: one section requiring the player to crouch and another requiring a jump. These mechanics could have been integrated much more deliberately into the level, giving the player more opportunities to interact with and make use of the movement system beyond simply getting from one encounter to the next.
