First off let me just say, I am a software developer and I am not new to building game mods. I am however completely new to the Unreal Engine. I’ve played around with the Ark Editor a little bit, creating landscapes and some blueprints to become familiar with it.
Here is what I am trying to do as some first steps to explore the mod capabilities…
- Create skills similar to what you would find in an RPG like Blacksmithing, Tinkering, Engineering, etc… This means both a UI that can be accessed via player inventory, and also make sure that these new player properties get saved into the game data. Depending on the skill levels you would have a chance to fail at crafting something, or even craft something of higher quality like ramshackle, etc…
- Create custom items that could give boosts to player stats. For instance a rare pair of boots might give players +50% movement speed.
- Replace the create survivor screen with a race(Like Elf, Dwarf, etc…) selection screen.
I’m not looking for a detailed guide on all of these things since I doubt that exists yet, but just basically if it’s possible to achieve this and some high level instruction on what editor features I should be using. For instance in another game I modded there would be a server side event for OnEquip and OnUnequip for items. This event could be handled per item class do to things like +50% movement speed, or when unequipping -50%.