Unreal Projects
Unreal Prototyping
Individual Project
Easy Weapon Designer Toolkit (EWDTK) (2022)
This image here is V1 of the project, V2 below
This project was created for the prototyping module. This project required me research and develop a tool / plugin for Unreal by doing development sprints and gathering user feedback.
I decided to create a system that would allow a designer to create weapons using modeled mesh parts to create new weapons or randomly create new weapon with a click of a button.
The configuration created here then could be used in the game to spawn the created configuration.
Whole user interface and blueprint code
Mesh finding and sorting. This system was flawed as I was saving the gun configs using integers that corresponded with the meshes inside the project meaning the if the other designer does not have the same meshes imported as the orginal gun config file it would use the wrong mesh or produce errors.
V2
In version 2 I implemented a updated user interface and allowed the user to click on the physical part of the gun model and use scroll wheel to quickly change the part without clicking the drop down box and scrolling through the parts.
These changes were based off user feedback and testing.
Overall this tool / plugin allowed users to import their own meshes with pre placed sockets to allowed snapping of parts to the correct positions so any part created could snap to existing sockets on the main body of the weapon.
Any meshes imported in to these folders are picked up and are added to the dropdown boxes for the user to use.
The config save and load system used mesh names instead of integers in a list meaning now as long 2 users have same imported mesh their gun configs would save and load between them.
Conclusion
Sadly I was not able to include all the feature I would like to add or ones suggested by users due to time constraints and other projects requiring my attention however I have learned about Unreal's asset management system and UMG design and interaction with the editor.
Individual Project
Battle of Britain: Sky Commander (2021)
Defend Britain against the waves of Axis planes by carefully managing resources and airfield locations.
Turn driven wave defence.
This project was for a game prototyping unit at university. I decided to challenge myself by creating a strategy game where the player manages Britain's resources and defend Britain's airspace by intercepting enemy bombers and fighters.
This project is currently left unfinished however here's the key features.
Fully implemented settings menu being able to save user graphics and sound setting with VULKAN work around to solve some some settings not supported by the VULKAN API in Unreal.
Resources and unit creation.
Upgrade and buy new airfield locations.
Live health and fuel information per unit and multiple unit selection and togglable actions.
Save and load games while keeping all player and AI planes location and tasks.
This project really made me look in to making clean blueprints as you can see this Blueprint is very messy and other blueprint programmer would get lost and confused on what they are looking at.
As you can see this game prototype is quite ambitious but I learned a lot about Unreal Save objects and storing save data and loading saves using blueprint. I also made the game be able to run on VULKAN. There was plenty of planned features for this game however fixing bugs took a long time to solve due to the complexity of the project and is unoptimized and unnecessary code that can be refactored by default Unreal. Most of the game was manually blueprinted rather using AI state machines and behaviour trees.
Conclusion
By doing this project I now know how clean blueprint layouts can help with debugging and ease of reading when following the code. From this project I became aware of behavior trees and how much time it would have save me programming the enemy AI.
Small RTS Project (2021)
Individual summer project
This was a summer project where I wanted to explore real time strategy gameplay systems.
This video shows me testing placing buildings and testing rotation and hitbox collision.
Crewmember (2020) First time with Unreal
Individual Project
Wave based first person defence
This project was my first time in unreal and was ambitious small prototype for unit.
The concept of the game was to defend your plane while managing and fixing your plane.
This was inspired by the game Bomber Crew but instead was in first person.
I had to learn basics of Unreal by blueprinting, using the montage system and using Cascade FX system.
Key features of this project is the heavy machine gun turret when fired it would start with 1 audio sample and then randomly switch to 9 others to create a realistic sounding machine gun that warmed up and also used VFX to show muzzle flash.
Conclusion
This project was fun to do as I had to search how to do things in Unreal and figure out how the core systems should work. From doing this project it really pushed me in to Unreal engine and started challenging my self by creating demos based off games I like to help gain knowledge on how those systems worked.
