Abatron - the making of a UE4 Hybrid game =)

[Devero]

Hello everyone! UE4 has a wonderful and growing community which our small team hopes to be part of. We want to share our experiences and joy that we are having while making our FPS/RTS hybrid game called Abatron.

We had already started Abatron in the Source engine and had the game almost ready for demo. We even went to Steam and got Greenlit, but after we saw UE4(*imagine jaw drops*)..... we came to an abrupt stop. For the past couple of months, we have been filling our bellies from the UE4 smorgasbord and began porting our assets over.

Since then, we have fallen in love with the capabilities of the Engine while getting Abatron back to a playable state. Plus, we have been incorporating cool new things UE4 allows us to do. Our current team includes awesome individuals that are great to work with and work well together. And recently, we were happy to welcome Rama to the team from the UE4 community who is also incredible to work with Joy Joy

We have alot yet to do and learn, but we will post our progress through our UE4 Journey.

[Devero]

Animating with Curves and Acceleration

In the following video, I show off the lesser known Curve Editor that we found useful for animations. As we develop animations, we want them to "feel" good to the player. One simple way of doing that is to add an additive layer of animation based off of the character acceleration.

Currently, we are doing typical animations and then adding some procedural layers to them. For UE4, we use the curve editor to draw an acceleration curve and a deceleration curve to our liking. Then, we drive an additive blendspace with that curve value. A big TIP for those wanting to do this, do not load the UCurveFloat* inside of an AnimInstance derived class. UE4 does not like this and you will never load your curve asset, so load them through your character class, thanks to Rama for helping figure that one out.

Enjoy, and have fun with your GameDev

[Jacky]

It looks pretty good! And nice use of curves. Hope you share more videos like this as you progress.

Good luck!

[QBert]

Nice idea, sounds like Natural Selection 2 a bit like FPS/RTS
Looking good from the video thanks for sharing

[Devero]

Thanks Jacky and QBert. We will try to have frequent posts

[ZackStefy]

Can't wait to play this game, i voted you guys on greenlight btw
Any estimation of the release date? Glad you guys ported on UE4, keep up the great work!

[Rama]

Abatron Is Awesome!

I am having so much fun with it!

It's truly intense FPS as well as RTS, which are my two favorite game genres!

Get ready to have exciting one on one duels with my AI and then go into RTS mode and place buildings that you can rotate any which way you want to build uniquely shaped bases !

And you should know, Devero is an amazing c++ programmer in addition to all of his ground-breaking animation research using UE4 curves and C++ !

He's combining BP and C++ to do very innovative things

♥

Rama

[Devero]

Awesome Zackstefy! Thanks for the support on Greenlight. We really appreciate everyone who voted for us.
The release date is a moving target but we are taking it day by day. A big component that still needs to be done is the menu system port which we will start on in 4.5, but we will use this thread to post progress, demos... ect..

Thanks Rama for the compliment

[FatMoth]

I think I have all of your rigging tuts saved for reference haha. Game looks awesome!

One note: wouldn't it make more sense for the hands to go down as you look up, and the hands go more in the frame as you look down? Opposite of how you have it.

[Devero]

Thanks FatMoth, you are actually very right. I had just reversed the direction to troubleshoot a blending problem right before the recording. Nice Catch!

[Devero]

Working on getting this guy into UE4 now. Rig is ready and now working on the shading. Leo used Substance Painter to texture this bad boy.

[Devero]

Manalock is in the game, and had way too much fun playing with some shading ideas. Here is some initial work.

Tan Version


Blue Version


Greyish Version

[crumbaker]

very nice, there was a game called machines that had a similar concept, it was highly underrated. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this one.

[Galeon]

Good work, the rhino skin looks somewhat like wet using specular, will look lot better using sub surface scattering from 4.5
Are the rocks from the vehicle demo or did you made them ?

[Devero]

@crumbaker Thanks, I hadn't heard of machines and sounds pretty cool.

@Galeon also thanks, I agree with you, i'm curious on the change post 4.5 Yes, those rocks are from the Vehicle game. They are very Epic rocks. hehe