Hi everyone hope you’re well. This is my first post here, my names Richard Seabrook, developer of Prospekt the Half-Life 2 game that went on sale in Feb this year. I’m going to start wrapping up the development of that project soon and from what i’ve seen I really think UE4 is the right direction for me as coding isn’t my strongest area. I’ve tinkered with blueprints and it seems like it’s going to be very quick to get the hang of.
I would really like to start getting to know the community and improving my skills with Unreal as I think Unreal is the right direction for game 2.
I have knocked up an extremely detailed and comprehensive plan ( Pictured below ) in fine detail.
I’m just looking for some direction on where I could start with this idea. I will bullet point the objectives below.
A constantly moving object upwards on screen.
Randomly generated pick up items and obstacles that scroll down screen.
Distance Traveled, Time elapsed and Energy Expended HUD.
A background that changes over distance also continually scrolling.
The player object is directed via the mouse input.
After all energy is expended the player must rapidly press a key to keep going until they hit a fuel pickup.
The object can pick up various power ups that increase the speed and size of the object.
The game goes on for infinitum until the player hits an object and dies.
This is the brief that i’m going for at the moment and I would be really greatful if anyone could point me in the right direction to start learning how to do this.
Looking forward to joining the community and making my second game!
Okay so its top down (90 degrees overhead), And its a an endless scroller. If you dont have any experience with UE4 i suggest going through a few tutorials to get you up to speed on the layout, Then check out a few of their templates. The flying template might be a good place to start. Looking in the various blueprints prepared in the templates can enlighten you as to the usage, and flow of the blueprint system. As to how to implement your game, UMG will easily handle the task of creating your GUI/HUD So do some tutorials on that. As to the movement mechanics. There are several different ways to attempt to implement this (of course). If i were to try. I might consider the relativity of the scene. You could try to move the ship inside the map, Or you could try to move the map around the ship so to speak. If your doing a procedural style content generation scheme where objects, and backgrounds may be continually generated forever it might actually be easier to just move the generated content around the ship instead of the other way around. IE the objects and background are moving, But the ship is actually stationary. Or maybe partially. For instance if you always moving up then the side to side movement might be worth doing to the ship (leaving the scene to just essentially move downward. Its a total illusion, But it works quite well. And gives you some significant design benefits when you start trying to figure how , and where to spawn stuff. Remember it never matters how things actually work, It only matters how they appear to work… Smoke, And mirrors… Always. Hopefully this is helpful in some way. Ultimately i’d say just start watching lots of tutorial videos, Watch others work in the system as much as you have time for. And dont be afraid to just explore and monkey around in some of the prebuilt game templates that are available. Honestly i think the simpler templates are the best place to explore, and monkey around in. The more expansive demo content can be a bit big to take in…
I suggest moving everything else vertically and not the player as Metahias suggested above. There is nothing in your list that would require C++, it can all be done in Blueprints.
Thanks very much for the information guys, so after a few days of thinking about this, I’ve seen UE4 can randomly generate content as you can see here : https://youtu.be/OVrfHO2DdOs?t=5m59s This particular design generates the map randomly and that’s what I would be looking for. Now I guess my question is why is the benefits / drawbacks of having the level move over the player moving or the other way around? Thanks for the info so far guys really insightful.
Allowing the player to fly forward through space at infinity means there are floating point rounding errors (The numbers used to track your position in the leve) that begins to happen the further you get away from the root level coordinates (0,0,0) Now im sure your game probably would’nt go out far enough to probably experience it. Though if its truly infinite then its an eventual certainty that you would get to far from the center of the world, And would eventually lose all coordination of the game components. This would not happen in the scenario in which your player stay’s effectively locked to center of the map and everything move around it. All the objects moving around the ship would eventually fall out of range of view, and hopefully be destroyed (We like to keep things tidey) once their no longer needed. There are other plus’s as well when you start deciding how to setup your spawner for the objects.
