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SOLO PROJECT
UNREAL ENGINE 5.5
BLUEPRINTS
WINDOWS
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
You play as a mining ship in a newly discovered asteroid belt, the goal is to harvest resources to create a Jump Gate to create commercial travel to the belt.
This was the first project I made in Unreal Engine (5.5), It took 5 months to create with all the assets in the game created by me apart from some Niagara visual effects which I found on the fab store for free. This was mainly to learn the engine and see what I could achieve with my limited knowledge and was extremely fun to work on!
MY CONTRIBUTIONS
Point and click player movement
Basic roaming AI
UI systems
Resource harvesting system
Environmental hazards (Gas clouds)
Step by step tutorial
Side mission / contracts system
Upgrades
SUMMARY OF DEVELOPMENT
UNDERSTANDING THE ENGINE
Being the first game I have worked on in unreal a lot of the early development was learning how unreal worked and getting to grips with blueprints, I first worked on and developed the basic movement and mineral harvesting mechanics. Since these were the core mechanics that the rest of the game is built around I wanted to get them in early even if it was rudimentary so I could have something I could build on visually and functionally.
I knew from the beginning that the core mechanic of harvesting minerals would have to change and expand the further I got through development so I ensured that it was an expandable system so that other systems could interact with ease and I could add and change minerals without issues.
IMPROVING GAMEPLAY LOOPS
As I got further into development with this project I learned about how important gameplay loops are and specifically how important it is to not make something feel repetitive, I found this challenge hard within this project as all you did was mine minerals, bring them to station, refine, sell and repeat. This being the core of the game also meant it was an unavoidable problem that I found during playtests and feedback sessions.
My solution: Side missions! Adding small missions where the player must find something or gather resources for meant that there was actual purpose to the core gameplay loop. This 'Contracts' gives the player a reward for doing this repetitive tasks within the game and adds complexity to the gameplay loop. These missions have a refresh loop so if you complete one, a new one will appear not long after so that the player can get different mission types during their play session!
PLAYER PROGRESSION & QA
During the game I wanted a way to improve how the game played with progression, so there was a clear skill increase for late game. I added upgrades so that the player could improve different things like mining speed or the stations refining quality, these upgrades would create a feeling of progression during gameplay and would also improve the pace of the game, removing the late game crawl to gain enough resources to complete something.
I also worked on gameplay improvements like a scanning ability so that the player could find asteroids easier and a waypoint pointing to the station after some feedback from playtests showed some players struggled to find asteroids and navigate around the world. Salvageable ships that has recoverable resources that are scattered in the belt so there's something to do other than mine asteroids.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Overall this was an extremely fun project to work on and I really enjoyed creating it. I learned a lot in Unreal Engine and something I might pick back up again in future to further develop and improve on, There's area that I could've done better like UI and created more interesting missions but due to time and knowledge constraints this is as far as I got.