The Great Emu War

The Great Emu War is a couch-competitive game released on Steam December 11, 2018. This game is a multiplayer experience that requires 2-4 players and an equal number of game controllers. I was a gameplay & map designer for the title.

The game pits two species, humans and emus, against each other in battles featuring asymmetric goals and abilities. The emu team must scurry across the map, gather fellow emus and trample the humans' crops. The human player uses a battle truck and must target emus using weapon pick ups scattered across the map.


The Great Emu War is a student project created by Suspicious Box, a team of students at the University of Central Florida's FIEA program.

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The final map, in it’s entirety.

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The first white box of the level. Only the bare essentials here to get the truck and the emus a space to playtest in. I created a landscape in Unreal 4, and painted the ground where our roads would be.

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On the left, is a placeholder for farmland. These are the objective points for the emus to coordinate an attack. On the right, a bridge and overpass with placholder cubes containing items and weapons for the player to use to fend off the emu swarm.

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Progress stages of our game’s waterfall. We needed to construct natural boundaries that players cannot move through to keep matches contained to the map.

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The final version of the whitebox, before environmental assets were implemented.

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I replaced our terrain and roads with more natural materials our artists made. Here we can also see our first rock assets, an updated pass of the waterfall, and emu flocks in the scene.

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The first pass of a forested area, and its subsequent iteration. Heavily forested areas are designed to give emus an advantage, as they are more narrow and can navigate these areas with greater efficiency than humans.

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Improvements being made to our terrain. This required lots of testing, as the truck was having issues with hitting slopes with too much verticality.

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Collision testing a bridge for the truck, and implementing the final version.

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At this stage, the level is complete! I was immensely satisfied with how we were able to achieve balance with our asymmetrical characters on one playing field.