Jaehyuk Choi Gameplay & Level Designer
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Games

THANG!

Freeze your friends solid, carry them to the oven, and bake them into popsicle weapons — a chaotic free-for-all party shooter set in a frozen town at the edge of the world.

Prototype Gameplay
Role
Creative Director & Lead Designer
Team
Overdawn Studio
Engine
Unreal Engine 5
Platform
PC (Windows & Mac)
Genre
Free-for-all party shooter
Release
March 2027 (planned)
Status
In development
THANG! poster — a polar bear in a red coat carrying a frozen cub across an icy town while blue freeze rays streak past a smoking central oven

Prototype Gameplay

Prototype footage from the current Unreal Engine 5 build — work in progress, not final.

Gameplay Video

Gameplay from the in-development build — work in progress, not final.

Design breakdown

Creative Director & Lead Designer

My Contributions

I direct THANG! at Overdawn Studio, owning the creative vision and the design of its systems while the wider team builds it.

  • Creative direction — set the tone and the three pillars the team designs toward: a readable core loop, chaotic encounters, and short social matches.
  • Gameplay systems — designed freezing, the oven, scoring and popsicle weapons as one connected model, so each system produces what the next one needs.
  • Level design — designed the arena’s concentric layout, its scoring zones, cover and sightlines around a single central objective.
  • Game Design Document — wrote and maintain the GDD (v1.4) the art, audio and engineering teams work from, and lead the calls on what ships first and what stays on the backlog.

THANG! is made by a team at Overdawn Studio; this page covers the design direction I own, not its implementation.

Core Gameplay Loop

Combat doesn’t end in a kill — it ends in an object. A frozen opponent is the only thing that scores, so every won fight creates the next objective.

  1. Freeze

    Shoot an opponent until they lock up solid.

  2. Carry

    The frozen bear becomes an object anyone can pick up.

  3. Bake

    Dunk or throw them into the central oven to score.

  4. Rearm

    The bake pops out a popsicle — a stronger, temporary weapon.

The weapon you win is what freezes the next bear.

Gameplay Design

Two polar bears fighting on an icy arena in the THANG! prototype — one carrying an ice-blue weapon, the other mid-swing with a bright slash effect, health bars above both
Combat prototype — weapon interactions and freezing mechanics.

The Freeze Bar replaces health with temperature: shoot a bear until it bottoms out and they freeze into a statue anyone can carry, instead of dying.

One central oven is the only place to score, the only source of weapons and the only place to thaw, so scoring, healing and rearming all resolve at the same contested spot. Delivering a frozen bear bakes it into a popsicle — a temporary, limited-ammo power spike that has to be re-earned.

Scoring values, timings and weapon damage are GDD specification and still in tuning.

Level Design — The Frozen Arena

The THANG! winter arena prototype — an igloo and scattered rocks on snow, tall ice pillars breaking sightlines, and a dark central oven structure rising above the frozen pond
Winter arena prototype — environmental cover, verticality, and central objective.

The arena is a frozen pond built in concentric rings around the oven: a tight, tree-lined dunk zone right on top of the objective, and an open ice field beyond it where long throws are worth more.

Igloos and rocks break sightlines into blind corners, bridges add elevation and firing lines into the centre, and few safe hiding spots keep bears rotating through the middle. There are no painted lines — the cover and elevation are what decide where a long shot is possible.

A top-down layout map will be added to this section once the blockout is locked.

Links

Prototype Gameplay

Contact

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