TEAM PROJECT
UNREAL ENGINE 5.7
BLUEPRINTS
WINDOWS
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
You play as a robot that's suddenly woken up in a strange and dying world, you must try and find purpose in the world like others and discover why you were even woken up in the first place.
This project was a team project of 3 people focusing on our narrative design skills, we learned narrative techniques to tell a story and create a game around it, I was the lead technical and UI designer on the team, creating the mechanics and interfaces in the project. I enjoyed working on this and is one of my more technical projects to date.
MY CONTRIBUTIONS
Third Person Controller
Inkpot Intergration
UI Systems
Grapple System
Double Jump / Ledge Mechanics
Tutorial System
Hacking Game Section
Landscape / Landscape Materials
SUMMARY OF DEVELOPMENT
CREATING THE PLAYER
The first thing I worked on in the project was to create the player and their platforming abilities, I laid out the different capabilities I wanted the player to have and settled on some key mechanics that I knew I wanted in the project:
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Sprint
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Dash
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Double Jump
These mechanics were pretty easy to create, only real issue I had was during the entire development I needed to constantly change values with the jump as the platforming changed a lot during development I also had to mess a lot with gravity and physics weight due to the character not having any friction so it slid on surfaces while dashing or sprinting.
ADVANCED PLATFORMING SYSTEMS
Further into development We decided to add more gameplay to the platforming so I added 2 new mechanics that were something I have never tried before:
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Ledge / Vaulting
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Grapple Hook
The first was the ledge mechanic which was simple in concept, I created a line trace system that when in the air search for a ledge that the player can vault up and then lerp the characters position to there, I then tried to mask this with motion matching but it refused to work and after some research and investigating I found that motion matching doesn't work in Unreal Engine 5.7 so unfortunately the ledge mechanic isn't perfect but I did my best to compensate with manually setting its position.
The grapple hook had its own issues but overall worked out better, it basically lerps the player to a set position and used a custom Niagara effect that on a timer sets it's start and end position to the player and the grapple hook point to give the effect of the rope. There is an animation that is suppose to play before the player is pulled but for an unknown reason it plays at super speed so it's hard to see, I tried timers, different animations and doing the animation and grapple code separately but unfortunately nothing worked.
Despite the issues the end result I think is clean and works for the project, I do suspect that all the issues for the advanced platforming mechanics are due to the engine version we were using.
HACKING GAME SECTION
The hacking section of the game is something I'm pretty proud to have accomplished. The main actor is a pawn that uses a collider set a certain distance from itself and runs a series of checks for the right condition allowing it to move in that direction like if a node is there, if it can reach it and what that node is. This meant I could communicate to the nodes as well and allowed for the character to move smoothly between the nodes without complex calculations.
The nodes themselves are basic enough with the ability to toggle specific ones to rotate and communicate to others to trigger different things. The rest are children of the basic node allowing for similar functionality and also for quick level creation and if needed modification, however this modular system of having a parent node and many children node ended up cause a lot of issues with the communication between the nodes and the player, this ended up with common bugs like delay in response from movement inputs, some nodes not activating when used, etc. I was able to root out most of these issues and now they mostly only occur when a player spams controls or intentionally tries to break it.
WORKING WITH INKPOT
We worked with Inkpot during the development of this project for the narrative dialogue with NPCs and although the software itself was easy to use and intuitive to learn, trying to integrate Ink files into Unreal Engine was a nightmare, we constantly had issues with it and ended up only being able to get 1 computer to be capable of import the files into the engine.
Once in the engine I was tasked with integrating the dialogue into the NPCs which wasn't too bad to do since we were already provided with a base NPC character with the ability to convert the Ink file into a interactable system, I only had to make some modifications to be compatible with our character controller and it worked fine after that although I will avoid using it again purely based on the importing issues which ate too much of our development time.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Working in a team on a project is always a fun and interesting experience, especially with this project, definitely could've done with better time management as the first few weeks we lost a lot of progress due to constant re designs and changing the scope of the project but that was mainly because we didn't really have a vision of what we wanted the game to be.
I personally enjoyed working on the mechanics of this project, leaning into more advanced systems like Niagara and and motion matching animations, I'm most proud of the hacking game as it creating it from scratch was out of my comfort zone and pushed my abilities as a technical designer despite the issues with it I'm confident if we continued development further that I could polish it into a really fun and engaging experience.