Epic Game Jam

Overview

Epic hosted a week long game jam and the theme was 'running out of space'.

My initial idea was that you had to survive on a platform while staying inside the bound of a box that moved around. Enemies and traps would spawn around you and while following the box, you have to defend yourself.

I had to scale down the scope of this project because I had to do it all myself and there was a lot of task that I'm new or not good at. For instance, level design, fps mechanics and modelling.

Final Product

Results

Incomplete as I had to move to university on the final day but i still wanted to give it a go.

Problem

• Bullets not registering hit. At the time, I was playing battlefield 5 and I liked seeing my tracer rounds flying in the ear so I wanted to reproduce it but the collision for fast moving projectiles is a bit tricky because they can move through objects. I thought this was the case in my project but it was because the projectile root object had to be a collider for it to work correctly.

• Networking. After the game jam, I tried to implement multiplayer. It was very interesting learning about replication network modes and roles such as simulated proxy. I got some rudimentary networking working and I tried to implement a lobby screen but to no avail.

Key Takeaways

• AI tasks and services. In this project, I created custom behaviour tree tasks and services to make more complex AI behaviour. Next I need to learn and implement e enemy perception.

• I learned how to make custom static meshes in the unreal engine.

• Instancing materials. I created a very simple master material and created child instances of it to speed up asset creation and texturing.

• level design. I'm still weak at level designing but more experience always helps. I need to research or find books about the process of level design.