Latest Project

Unreal Engine 5

Since my primary software training and experience was tied to Unity, I decided to further branch out to other engines to help improve my skillset. With this in mind, I decided to strengthen my Unreal Engine experience with their newest engine version, UE5.

So with this recent development, I've decided to work with my strengths of programming and systems development by trying to develop a more complicated game within Unreal Engine 5, to accustom myself to the engines blueprint and actor system.

So I would like to show too you the project in question, with its working title "Vamp Brawler"

Getting Started: Road to the prototype!

Started: November 19th 2023

At the start of this project, I had a strong idea for what the gameplay experience would be, a top down brawler where the player controls a vampire. In order to prevent this project from feature creeping quickly, I decided a on a few barebones systems I wanted before making a displayable prototype:

Comfortable feeling top down controls
The bare bones combat system
Simple AI enemies

With these goals in mind, I set about making the character look towards the cursor, achieved quickly with the blueprinting system. Then afterwards I changed the controls to work on the commonplace WASD controls scheme for keyboard. Continuing on, I made some simple combat actions, with shooting a small gun, that could delete enemies. Lastly I setup a basic enemy that would walk towards the player.
Here's a video with an early progress report

Updated: November 21st 2023

With these basics setup, and feeling more warmed up with the Unreal Engine 5 blueprinting system, I looked into making these mechanics more refined and less amateurish. To achieve this, I set some more small goals that could be achieved quickly to maintain progress:

Refine the combat system, add some melee attack actions
Add some more animations to reduce the janky look of the project
Implement a proper health system

Starting with the combat system, I removed the gun due to its basic functionality, and decided to set it aside for further use in the game. For me to make a combat system for the player, I know I wanted a few things: A combo system, a way to continue combos, and satisfying hit reactions. With this in mind I set about a simple 1-2-3 hit combo, with a 0.3 delay period between each hit that the combo could be continued. I downloaded some free animations off Mixamo and tried importing them, to realize that I didn't want to use the Mixamo model.

This wasn't a major issue, but it did lead me into working onto the 2nd part of the project, that being adding in more animations that the basic ones present in UE5's default settings. To do this I discovered I would need to make an 'Inverse Kinematics Retargeter', that if I setup properly, would allow me to translate animations from one skeleton to anther. This would help majorly in future projects even without Mixamo exclusive models, so I set about make a simple 'IK-Retargeter'. With this completed, I could implement more specific animations to be used in both the combat system, and in general animations for the player and enemy characters.

Finally, I reworked the combat system to be more flexible, with potential options for healing, setting invulnerability frames and states, and finally some proper death logic. Though due to my shortsightedness I only applied these changes too a duplicate model of the charact6er that shared its rotation logic, so it'll look a bit funny in the demonstration video below.