Development Roles: Designer, Programmer
Engine: Unreal Engine
Summary: I wanted to make a simple platformer (like Banjo-Kazooie and Ape Escape) and learn how to use the Unreal Engine while I made it. So I did! Have the player run, jump, shoot, and punch their way around a mountain to collect stuff and progress forward.
Prototype Assets: Visual assets (textures/materials/upgrade prop/grass) do not belong to me. They were acquired from the Unreal Marketplace.
Engine: Unreal Engine
Summary: I wanted to make a simple platformer (like Banjo-Kazooie and Ape Escape) and learn how to use the Unreal Engine while I made it. So I did! Have the player run, jump, shoot, and punch their way around a mountain to collect stuff and progress forward.
Prototype Assets: Visual assets (textures/materials/upgrade prop/grass) do not belong to me. They were acquired from the Unreal Marketplace.
Setup
Character/Enemy Basic Interactions
Character Taking Damage and Jumping
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Roadmap: Always gotta start with documentation. This really helped me plan out how much I wanted to do, especially in how I wanted areas to connect to one another. I planned character abilities, how they would be acquired, interaction with enemies, pickups, and a basic overview of level layout.
Unreal Boot Camp: I need to start off by saying that the tutorials and lessons given by Unreal's documentation helped me out so much in figuring out the more complex stuff. Setting up double jumps, punching, and shooting through blueprints was easy enough. It wasn't until I needed the documentation and step-by-step tutorials from Unreal to understand and use updating UI and AI behavior trees. With the latter, I was able to learn how to set up tasks for the AI, have it perceive its environment, and react to stuff with its senses. |
Level Design
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Scaling: I wanted to have the areas project a feeling of running around in forest/wooded areas while running through and collecting everything. I also didn't realize how older platformers on the N64/PS1 just had walls that shot straight up and did just that for my surroundings. I had to scale back from 8 areas in my documentation down to 6, since I didn't want to spend forever on this one project. For area 5, I took inspiration from Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time's ravine transition area between Hyrule Field and Zora's Domain of jumping across pathways and including a pathway backwards towards a collectible.
What I Learned While Mapping: This was all about me getting used to painting ground textures and working with the expansive landscape tools in Unreal. I learned how to shape the terrain, copy geometry, use foliage, apply trees as foliage, and a little about setting up materials for the terrain. Now I can comfortably say I know how to make basic terrain in Unity and Unreal now! |
